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