Why would someone lay out a graph in this manner? (Time on y axis with most recent at bottom and numbers on x axis increasing to the right) Its just…wrong.
I would assume it was so they could put the words horizontally rather than have to put them vertically.
It’s so that you can read the quotes in order from top to bottom. You want the largest number and the latest date to be on the bottom right, and this arrangement is the most efficient way to make that work.
I would at least flip the timeline (Y-axis). It maintains readability and allows for additional trumpian inanities. Sky’s the limit.
O.K. - I guess I’ve never seen a graph where a line that moves downward indicates an increasing number over time - e…g. stock market, every other Covid graph that I’ve seen. To add new data you have to move the whole graph, not merely add to it.
Focus on the sentences, not the graph. As Tim R. Mortiss and SpoilerVirgin say, we’re used to reading horizontally, and from top to bottom.
One wants the chronology to read from the past toward the present. The design is clever. If you’re right that organizing a graph like that is unusual, then call the design very clever.
O.K. Maybe I’m beating a dead horse and I’m definitely slow but what is so clever about it unless the point is to mis-lead? If you were to look at the that graph, (call it “cases over time”) and the axises weren’t named, you’d probably believe that there has been a huge drop in numbers. Focus on the sentences? Why? The whole point of a graph is to give you a visual representation of the data in an easy to understand manner. I’ve seen other, more traditional, graphs with Trumps lies and misleading statements and IMHO, they are much more effective at making the point. Which IS the point.
In english we read left to right and top to bottom. You are focusing on numbers when the chart is clearly laid out for reading. Think of it as a consise graphic of what was going on in the country when Trump said each thing.
If the numbers were laid out more traditionally for their ease of reading you would either have the words in a harder orientation or you would read from the bottom up neither of which is ideal.
I think it’s clever, but that it does lose a bit of impact by having a graph in an unusual format.
They’d be better of just overlaying the quotes on a faded out graph, with faded out connectors behind the text. Makes the graph less prominent, but the graph as is isn’t a good element anyway.