It's a Poetic Kenning for Glory

there’s sixteen Colorado counties that their most searched was “wolf furry”, plus thirty-odd counties (not counting either Arapahoe or any of the ones marked here as “Insufficient Data”) which may well have had plenty of searches for “wolf furry”, just fewer than for whatever they’re labeled here

and “skunk furry” searches in Arapahoe County outnumbered “wolf furry” searches in the entire state of Colorado

Someone linked me this beautiful poster, and I'm just really impressed.

My contribution:

fascinated by this. seriously? you think it makes total sense? read the tags in the notes, and note how many people totally failed to realize the "intended" pattern was even possible. yes, people tend to start with a brightly-colored thing, but once they start reading, they tend to read nearby text next rather than jumping around.

so once you've read "it is against the law to", your brain isn't coming to the poster fresh looking for the most brightly colored text it can find, or looking for something on the same circle but oriented the opposite direction with respect to the circle's path; it's going to look for a new line of text that starts just below the line of text it just read, and get "keep alcohol out of", and keep doing that, getting "it is against the law to keep alcohol out of the hands of youth supply alcohol to minors".

if you don't follow that, well, look at the mockup i did, and note how many people read it as "graphic passion is my design", because top-down wins over outside-in.

this is one of those things where if your academic model of the thing is not predicting the real-world outcome, it's very important to recognize that since graphic design is about communication, and communication is about what people actually get from seeing the work, if lots of people are "reading it wrong", that means it is designed wrong. doesn't matter that you have an abstract theory about how they "should" read it.