The Georgia Negro: A Social Study - Bar graph shows amount spent on rent, food, clothes, taxes, and other expenses by families in various income brackets [LCCN2013650354]
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 leader lines are the mechanism: they weld seven separate stacked bars into one continuous shape, so the reader tracks a boundary drifting across the sheet instead of comparing seven sets of percentages. That converts a table into a trend. Mounting a real photograph, a real government dietary and a real tax schedule inside the column heads anchors each abstract budget category to a physical thing, which is why the chart reads as reportage rather than statistics. The braces at the right supply the interpretation - poor, fair, comfortable, well-to-do - so the reader is told what the arithmetic means without a paragraph of copy. The lift-up frame turns the board into an interactive object and handles the depth problem: headline on the surface, detail underneath for whoever wants it.
Steal this when
When one variable reorders a whole set of proportions - spend by revenue band, time use by seniority, budget by company size. Stack each band as a full-width bar, connect the segment boundaries across bands with leader lines, and label the bands with the judgement you want the reader to reach.