Scaffold Chart Sins site with Astro + build-time Vega-Lite

Set up the static-site tech stack: Astro 5 with Markdown content
collections, Vega-Lite specs rendered to static SVG at build time
(zero client JS), plain scoped CSS, and a GitHub Pages deploy workflow.

Includes three sample sins (truncated y-axis, dual-axis deception,
pie chart overload), each with a bad and fixed chart spec, plus a
gallery index and per-sin detail pages.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XPEvmMbac2fCvKXpQcovj8
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2026-08-05 11:57:52 +00:00
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---
title: "Pie Chart Overload"
summary: "Eight near-identical slices no human eye can rank. A bar chart was right there."
category: "Chart-Type Abuse"
severity: 3
tags: ["pie chart", "part-to-whole", "comparison"]
badChart: "pie-overload-bad"
fixedChart: "pie-overload-fixed"
date: 2026-08-05
---
## The sin
The pie chart asks the reader to compare **angles** — something people are
genuinely bad at. One or two slices, fine. But eight slices, several of them
within a percentage point of each other? Nobody can tell whether Firefox beats
Samsung by eyeballing two thin wedges on opposite sides of the circle.
## Why it deceives
Angle and area are hard to judge precisely, and slices scattered around the
circle can't be lined up against a common baseline. The small categories blur
into an indistinguishable fringe, and the ranking — usually the whole point —
becomes guesswork.
## The repentance
Use a **sorted horizontal bar chart**. Every value shares one baseline, the
ordering is explicit, and long labels sit comfortably beside their bars. Reserve
the pie for the rare case of two or three parts of an obvious whole — and even
then, a bar chart rarely does worse.