Pie charts have been hav­ing a bad time of it lately* and I can’t see things improv­ing any­time soon.

In one of the bet­ter arti­cles look­ing at this hum­ble chart, Brian Suda notes not only at what you can do instead, but what improve­ments you can make if you’re forced to use the pie chart.

The orig­i­nal idea behind a pie chart is that it rep­re­sents parts of a whole, each sliver or wedge is a sec­tion, when totaled gives you the over­all pic­ture. Over the years pie charts have mor­phed purely into eye-candy, exem­pli­fied by their sis­ter graph the dough­nut chart, which offers zero addi­tional information.

If we look at a few exam­ples, you will quickly see the fail­ings in the cir­cu­lar design along with how easy it can be used to mis­rep­re­sent data.

One such exam­ple of how a pie chart can be used to mis­rep­re­sent data was Steve Jobs’ keynote at Mac­world 2008–as dis­cussed in Suda’s arti­cle and over at The Guardian.

* Seth Godin called pie charts “spec­tac­u­larly over­rated” and Seed said we need to “get past the pie chart”.