Stephen von Worley re-designed Velociraptor’s Crayola Crayon color chart into a rainbow:
The radials make it much easier to see the most recent colors than in the original version:
He also tried several other shapes (below), and an interactive version. (via)
I’m posting this more because it’s an example of a well designed cartogram map, more than because of the content. (via)
As excellent article over at the Guardian about the rise of data journalism and what it takes to do it right.
In: Graphic Design (general) Interactive News Media Politics
4 May 2011There were so many of these last month I stopped looking at them – but this one is cute. Yes, I said cute. It’s an interactive flying timeline of protest milestones for 17 countries. Click on any of them to bring up a full Guardian article. They are also keeping it up to date (as of today, anyway).
The images were obviously chosen to be inflammatory – but the infographic is carefully constructed to do so in a serious way.
I receive a lot of emails asking what tools can be used to move past excel and create cool charts. Well, here’s one: ezViz is a very affordable ($79) desktop data visualization analysis tool that has many of the same cool features as much more expensive products such as Tableau and Spotfire. Starting with an excel spreadsheet you can easily assign variables to chart attributes, filter, and drill down through your data. Chart types include heatmaps, scatter bubbles, maps, and surface plots, among others. Watch the video and read the manual to see some of the nifty features included. Tableau and Spotfire are awesome and more powerful products, obviously, but they have priced themselves so far out of the reach of researchers and analysts that it’s nice to see a product like this fill in the gap a little.
I usually don’t post these column-style infographics anymore, because most of them are shitty link-bait. But this one on teen drug use cites a quality recent source, doesn’t over-use symbols or clip art, properly highlights key observations, and uses a consistent color scheme. Nice work! Oh, and high school kids – don’t do drugs.
In: Culture Employment Finance Graphic Design (general) History Innovative Politics Science US Economy
22 Mar 2011Karl Hartig was creating beautiful complex data visualizations back when most of us “graphics experts” were still trying to figure out how to change colors in excel. Here is a selection of his work on population, electronics, energy, stocks, immigration, politics, and music. Soak it up!
No it’s not a musical. Artist Bard Edlund’s “Dow Piano” translates the performance of the Dow each day onto a three octave scale, and adjusts the volume of each note according to trading volume. I guess instead of data visualization we could call this data audioization – or we could just call it cool.
An addictive collection of beautiful charts, graphs, maps, and interactive data visualization toys -- on topics from around the world.