Spiral bar graph using ggplot2

Question

I'm trying to replicate this plot, particularly the spiral bar chart for INDUSTRIAL. Any idea how to do this using ggplot2?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, this is so specific (and so against modern data visualization best practices), that Photoshop is probably the best tool for the job. That said, here's a version that chops up the longest bar into multiple pieces. Not a spiral, but the same basic idea of collapsing a disproportionately large y-axis value by letting it move across the x-axis.

library(tidyverse)

df <- data.frame(
  vocation = c('business', 'classical', 'industrial'),
  enrollment = c(12, 98, 2252)
)

max.bar.size <- 600
df.cut <- df %>% 
  group_by(vocation) %>% 
  summarize(
    bar = 1:(floor(enrollment / max.bar.size) + 1),
    enrollment = c(rep(max.bar.size, floor(enrollment / max.bar.size)), enrollment %% max.bar.size)
  ) %>% 
  mutate(bar = as.character(bar))

ggplot(data = df.cut, aes(x = vocation, y = enrollment, group = bar)) +
  geom_col(position = position_dodge2(preserve = 'single'))