Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: Bildstatistisches Elementarwerk - Altamerikanische Kulturen um 1500 [14080.016]
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
The governing rule is visible in the artwork: a larger quantity is shown as more figures of a fixed size, never as a bigger figure, which removes the area-judgement error that proportional symbols force on a reader. The pictogram is reduced to a silhouette with no modelling and no outline weight variation, so twenty of them read as a countable row rather than as twenty drawings. Ground colour is held to flat unmodulated fills and the base map is drained of everything not needed, which leaves the red figures as the only saturated element and therefore the only thing the eye lands on. The unit key is one short line in the same weight as the labels, placed where a reader hits it before leaving the page.
Steal this when
Use this when a lay audience has to compare quantities across places and you cannot rely on them reading an axis. Fix one symbol to one unit, repeat it, and drain the background until the symbols are the only saturated thing on the page.