History of Bear Stearns

This timeline, from a New York Times article is sort of a nice way to give readers a quick overview of the history of the company (it would take much more time to deliver the same amount of information in prose), but it wastes space on large photographs of six different people, fails to organize its text boxes in a way that makes much sense, and misses out on a good opportunity to do some comparative analysis. For instance, the designer could have plotted these important events in the company's history on a line indicating its stock price in inflation-adjusted dollars, which would have allowed readers to make the fact that the firm opened its first international office in 1955 actually mean something. Instead, the graphic gives readers a number of facts which aren't obviously related to each other in an important way (except that they all concern the same comapny). Tufte would not be happy with this graph, especially the six photographs.