that illustrated the orders of magnitude of radiation dosage was a great use of visual presentation to illustrate scale - why is it in the hall of shame?
If I read it correctly, they're actually trying to contrast it to the previous example, so it's an example of a good infographic. The website is not exactly clear about this though (ironically).
It looks like the website itself deserves a dart-board. It puts the beautiful illustration of radiation dosage in with the worst graphs, but that horrible network visualisation in with the best. There are numerous such examples.
I too got confused assuming the list to represent all examples of poor visualisation. Reading the text didn't help much. Because the list is presented top-down in sequence, a reader immediately assumes a homogeneous list of items.
A side-by-side would make clear distinction of "Good" vs "Bad".
I agree with jmpeax. This page needs to be presented as an example of poor presentation.
I don't see where it's clearly stated that it's a good design, and it's in a "darts" section, which seems to indicate it's a "bad" example, which I infer only from the thumbs-down icon. The main gallery page never explains the "laurels and darts" terms. Are these common? Why have separate laurels and darts sections if they are both to include both good and bad examples?