Businessweek’s bleeding-edge approach to typography, layout and overall design is one of the features that keeps me reading the magazine in print form. The design team also often delves into experiments with data visualization and short-form infographics and the most recent issue (Sept 3, 2012) is no exception. Given my proclivity towards slopegraphs, I felt compelled to comment both on their “U.S. Stocks Lead the World” slopegraph:

I think they did a fine job combining some of the aspects of a bubble chart with a rank-order slopegraph. Normally, annotation would be necessary as most slopegraphs are comparing values instead of position; however there is sufficient labeling and consistent use of sizing, colors and other visualization hints to overcome most — if not all — of the problems usually found when using a slopegraph.

Kudos to both Lu Wang and Rita Nazareth!