I recently was sent a graph from an organization that wanted me to format it nicer and change the colors. The organization had to file a report that needed to include information on their demographics. (I anonymized all the data to protect my client.)

There are some straightforward formatting improvements to be made.

The organization had been making great strides towards a more diverse workforce, but the most noticeable part of their graph was that their senior executives were a homogenous 100% one ethnicity. I asked how many people were in that group, and it was only 4 people. Although they are striving for more diversity in their executives, this graph unfairly exaggerates the issue. Four people can never be as diverse as 200 hundred people. I offered a second option, that also showed the different sizes of these 4 groups of people:

Not only does this de-emphasize the homogeneity of their executives, but it's also arguably a little more fair to the real situation since it also displays the size of the groups. (Although, as a side note, they probably would benefit from more diversity with their executive leaders.)

In this case, the base graph came from Excel which was copy pasted into Adobe Illustrator. I ungrouped and released all clipping masks. I deleted the grid lines and converted the text to the paragraph styles that I wanted. I made a second regular bar graph in excel of the N numbers, and brought that in Adobe Illustrator. I then grouped each of my original stacked bars and, using smart guides, precisely snapped the stacked bars to their new bar height. The resulting vector graphic is so precise that the original data table could be re-created from analytic analysis of the graphic.

It would be interesting to compare these groups against the local population at large, but I guess that wasn't part of their report.