In the news

Seeing as shapes were one of the first things I learnt as a nipper, I wouldn't have said it was hard to perceive the *relative** area of a circle in the first place.

*it's only necessary to understand the size relative to the next circle

Yes, but the point is its hard relative to other methods of displaying the data. If the point of designing an infographic is to make information easy for users to understand and visually pleasing, then using the relative area of circles may not be the best method because its not the easiest to understand. Lets not forget not everyone has the same ability to perceive the relative area of circles, whereas using something like a series of repeated square units would be much easier to understand for everyone, making the infographic a more powerful tool.