Tableaux d'arithmetique lineaire (French edition of the Commercial and Political Atlas) - Tableau des sommes accordées par le Parlement d'Angleterre pour ce qu'on appelle services. Pillot Scrip [14319.058]
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 title carries the editorial. Setting pour ce qu'on appelle Services plants doubt about the category before the reader has looked at a single value, and then the two 500-million spikes make the doubt feel earned; it is one of the few places Playfair lets an opinion into the lettering. The sheet is the aggregate that the departmental plates break down, so it comes first in the bound run and is drawn at the coarsest division, twenty millions, which sets the reader's sense of scale before the parts arrive. Keeping the identical frame, cartouche position and caption slot as the plates that follow makes the whole-to-parts hierarchy legible without a word of explanation. Typographic emphasis does the last bit of work: the loaded word is the largest thing in the cartouche.
Steal this when
Use it when you lead a set of breakdowns with the total, and you want one loaded word in the title to frame everything that follows. Set that word larger than the rest of the title so the framing lands before the data does.