#MakeoverMonday: 2020/W28: Penguin Flipper and Bill Length at Palmer Station

This week's visualisation to makeover:
For #MakeoverMonday we’re looking at flipper and bill lengths of penguins in Antarctica, inspired by some fantastic work by
@allison_horst
 - tweet: @TriMyData

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For my first #MondayMakeover, I initially struggled to find the story. Here was a dataset about three different species of penguins, comparing the relationship between Flipper Length and Bill Length. 

It was clear that there is a relationship between the two measurements, but the correlation wasn't interesting to me....I had to find a different angle.

A quick bit of googling and I found the story. Adelie penguins are native (and have been for a long time) to the Palmer Peninsular in Antarctica. The Chinstrap and Gentoo Penguins however are newcomers to the region. Furthermore, the Adelie penguins are on a sharp decline. In any society where two species contest the same food source, trouble is going to take place. Therefore the introduction of the different species and consequences based on their relative size looked to be the story for me.

Therefore for my visualisation I took the following design decisions:

1. Share the backstory in fairly detailed prose to educate the reader.
2. Choose a colour scheme that matched to images I found from the region.
3. Simplify the data by only showing the average sizes of the three species - I like showing individual data points but they are not needed to support my story.
4. I chose to select a blue colour for my Adelie penguin bars (no pun intended!) that matched the colour I used for my Antarctica image to demonstrate they were native to the area.

Here's my final image. Let me know what you think and does it make for a more interesting and insightful visualisation than the original?