Hi, Dan. I’m torn there. On one hand. for a dashboard summarizing a single country, you almost expect such a graphical component, and you need something to draw the eye and be more prominent than all your other detailed readouts. So that makes it a justifiable design choice, I think. Even though I also think it’s hard to get too much out of the graph besides overall size.

The small multiples display is nice looking; but I think the readers’ conclusions will be limited to “some countries are bigger overall than others” and “there’s a downward spike that persists even in the low countries.” I think that’s law and order. And that is an interesting point. So if that’s a conclusion you want people to draw, the display does its job!

One thing that’s interesting to me in this data is which countries are improving/declining. That’s kind of hidden here, but could be brought out just by colorizing the area between the two year lines: red for decline, say, and green for improvement.

But that case sort of brings up my overall feeling: that it might be just as good to compress all the variables into an overall score, and show circles. You can’t, after all, show everything, or emphasize everything in any mode of communication — distilling things down is sometimes the best service you can do for your readers