I was just offered money to post an infographic. Seriously, people. It’s a BLOG. Let’s keep some perspective, shall we? Put that money towards hiring a graphic designer or statistician. If you have a product you want promoted, buy an ad.

Thank you to the lovely companies and artists who have chosen to advertise on Chart Porn. You keep the servers running and the posts flowing.

History Shots – Elegant graphics and wall art on a variety of historical subjects (politics, sports, music, science, etc). These really are slick — if you don’t want one for yourself, I guarantee you’ll find something here that would make a great gift.

Beer Smith – Take the guesswork out of homebrewing with Beer Smith’s software. They also have excellent blog articles and podcasts about beer in general.

Joel Traylor Art – Ok, I’ll confess I’m biased. I’ve known Joel for years and have several of his art pieces up on the walls of my office and home. He has a great eye for color and shape – check out the whole gallery to see what I mean.

Irritant Gear – Safety Third. ‘nuff said.

Note on Advertising: After experimenting with Google-ads and a few other ad networks I realized that most of them suck — because they encourage bloggers and companies to waste time on SEO keywords and other nonsense instead of content and product value. Thankfully, I came across the Blogads network, which lets companies pick exactly what sites they want to market to, and lets me filter out spam ads and other tacky crap I don’t want on my site. I suppose it’s a bit old school advertising, but it works very well for me.

So, if you would like to advertise on Chart Porn and reach an audience of smart, creative, tech savvy, inquisitive people for as little as $10/week, click on the box below:

With some regret, I am going to start experimenting with ads on Chart Porn. The blog’s success has increased bandwidth use by more than 400% in the past year, while the donation box has gone largely unused.  Handling this level of demand (and future growth) has forced me to look into funding options. I will try to keep the ads as un-obnoxious as possible. Feel free to complain, scream, and shout about me being a sell-out, if the urge strikes you.

On the other hand, lingering guilt from doing this will likely motivate me to work harder and make further improvements to the site.

In First Place: “You Don’t Know Jack About Politics: Idiots Edition” by Ashley Browning.  Ashley did a great job combining interesting information and some relevant silliness – which is exactly how I like my infographics.

2nd Place: “The Compare-o-Tron” by Sam Freund.  Sam took an empirical look at the issue by charting the google-hit correlation percentages of any three terms you enter. The below chart is just one example of the kinds of comparisons you can do.

Congrats to Ashley and Sam and thanks for your entries!

The deadline is today. To be honest, we haven’t gotten many submissions. I hope a lot of you are working feverishly and planning to send your masterpieces at the last minute.

Prizes up for grabs:

1st place: $250
2nd place: Copies of all four Edward Tufte Hardcover books (1,2,3,4)
3rd place: A copy of John Wade’s “How to Design Cool Stuff”, and the “Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics”.
4th place: A copy of Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement”.

Send in your submissions!
1st place: $250
2nd place: Copies of all four Edward Tufte Hardcover books (1,2,3,4)
3rd place: A copy of John Wade’s “How to Design Cool Stuff”, and the “Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics”.
4th place: A copy of Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement”.

Details and rules.

Chart Porn is throwing a contest! I am tired of seeing economic and political terms like “socialism”, “communism”, “fascism”, “tyranny”, “nazi”, “muslim”, “democracy”, “globalism” and others tossed around with no regard for their actual meaning. So I’m reaching out to the design community to help end the confusion.

Prizes:
1st place: $250
2nd place: Copies of all four Edward Tufte Hardcover books (1,2,3,4)
3rd place: A copy of John Wade’s “How to Design Cool Stuff”, and the “Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics”.
4th place: A copy of Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement”.

Note: Several of the designs may also be displayed/distributed in Washington DC at the October 30th Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive event.

Description:  Create an infographic that compares different economic and/or political systems.

I’m leaving it completely open to the designers to decide how they want to organize it, how snarky to make it, what political or economic terms to include, and how to do the comparisons. But here are some suggestions to get you started: What are the systems’ defining attributes? How stupid do you have to be to confuse these issues? What are the worst examples of why this is bad (Stalin/Hitler/Pol pot)? Include odd little known relevant facts (health care isn’t free in China/number of people Stalin had killed/tax increases that led to original tea party)? Why it is incorrect  to use this label for the United States? Which are economic systems vs political systems or both? Different formats?: maybe a double sided reference card (one side economics, one politics) to hand out to tea party protesters? A flowchart for identifying differences? Heck, if you want to, go ahead and create an infographic showing how Obama really is all of these things at the same time. In other words: get creative.

Deadline for Submissions: October 15, 2010.

Judging: All prizes will be awarded based on my completely subjective opinion as to which are the best designs.

Technical submission requirements: Submissions should be in Illustrator, Photoshop, or PDF format and must be emailed to dustin@chartporn.org. (If you do something really wacky like a video or interactive tool, get in touch and we’ll work it out.)

Detailed contest rules: Read them here.

Confession: this contest was partly inspired by Adam Sacks’ below design:

note: The inclusion of the above books as prizes in no way indicates the authors’ endorsement of this contest – they are just great books that I thought would make great prizes.

Chart Porn is going on a short summer vacation, but will be back in early September with some fun new features. Thanks to everyone for your support this year. Now go out and enjoy the rest of your summer!

From now on, all Chartporn posts will be mirrored in Facebook. While a lot of you seem happy with RSS, twitter, or (god forbid!) actually visiting the website, I know many like to use Facebook to keep current on internet memes.

If you go to the Facebook page and click on the “like” button, new posts will show up in your newsfeed.

Apologies to everyone for the lack of recent posts – I’ve been alternately crushed by work and vacations the past few weeks. The good news is that I have a large pile of high quality stuff to satiate you in the coming days. So, without further ado, we  now return you to a more regular and balanced diet of Chart Porn.

Much to my annoyance, Chartporn is experiencing some technical problems today. I apologize for the inconvenience. Please stand by.

Update: 3/12 — Everything should be working fine now. Let me know if anyone encounters problems.

I created Chart Porn because I love graphics. I love data. I love visualizations.  I love sharing with other people the information, perspective, and inspiration that I gain from all these works of data art.

I maintain Chart Porn because it’s fun. I have enjoyed watching it evolve over time, and I am regularly entertained by the emails I get behind the scenes from designers, news outlets, researchers, students, and other bloggers. One of my favorites from last year asked very politely if I could please mirror the blog under a different name so they could forward it to their family without embarrassment. (Ummmm… No.)

A friend asked me recently if I was making any money from the site now that it has a bit of a following. To be honest, I hadn’t thought seriously about it. I have a full time job. Hosting Chart Porn doesn’t cost all that much (though I did just upgrade to a bigger server), and I’ve always thought of it as a gift. I love the minimalist design of the site and don’t want to mar it with advertisements – so that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

After giving it some thought, I have decided to add a donation box to the sidebar of the website. I’ve read that some people view blog tip jars as cheesy panhandling. I don’t see it that way. It’s a tip – a sign of appreciation for doing good work.

If Chart Porn makes you laugh or think on a regularly basis and you want to show your thanks, then feel free to click on the donation box. If not, that’s fine too. I’ll keep posting cool charts either way.

Thanks!

Ok, that was easy. FYI, I recommend Innohosting.com for all your hosting needs; they smooth over any bumps quickly and are always patient with (stupid) questions. We now return you to your regularly scheduled chart porn.

Hey everyone, I’m upgrading the site to expand capacity, so things may be a little wonky for the next few days. Hang in there and I’ll post new stuff soon.