Approaching the Data Also, I encountered a problem my layout had at that point. The data was skewed to a degree that made it impossible to show it in a clear, interesting way. The comparison of Brazil, with its more than 200 million Portuguese-speakers, and Goa, with only a handful, will always result in an enormous element that goes off-screen and a tiny, one-square-pixel dot that becomes too insignificant to notice.
Therefore, I had to simplify the data I wanted to represent. I decided that depicting the various continents instead of the countries would compress the data and result in a clearer, understandable visualization. I also experimented with different layouts. Perfect concentric circles with geometrical shapes as the smaller elements seemed simplistic and not expressive enough. I explored manipulating the circle shapes based on the data as well as using a polygonal layout instead of the circular. In a hexagonal layout, for instance, each corner would represent a continent (ignoring Antarctica) and the circles representing the continents would be as large and as far out towards the corner as many Portuguese-speakers there are there. However, the data was remained skewed: comparing the 12 million Portuguese-speakers of Africa with the 209 of Brazil still resulted in an uninteresting and skewed visualization.