Update: Economic Indicators Dashboard
25 Jan 2013One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. Looks like a lot of indicators are finally in the “typical” range.
Things might be getting back to normal.
California for Beginners
25 Jan 2013Amusing and accurate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the original source to link back to.
update: created by Julian Lozos. Nice work!
Travel Speed (1800-1930)
11 Jan 2013Sure, the internet and the information revolution has been fun. But before that there was the communication revolution. And before that, it was transportation:
(original source: 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, which has a number of other cool historical maps)
More Hotness
10 Jan 2013Apparently the forecasts for the current heat-wave in Australia are so hot that the Bureau of Meteorology had to add two new colors to it’s forecasting map:
And here is the NYT version of of the 2012 temperature map. I like the city histograms at the bottom.
2012 Hottest Year on Record
9 Jan 2013
California Shooting Location Map
2 Jan 2013An amusing map from 1927, showing which areas of California could be used to film movies that you wanted to look like other parts of the world.
Helical Orbits
26 Dec 2012DC Metro Station Traffic
In: Maps
21 Dec 2012Interesting analysis of metro traffic. But I am always left wanting by ordinal rankings. Perhaps coloring the stations themselves in a heatmap manner while desaturating the line colors would have been more useful.
On the same site is the awesome “Evolution of Metrorail” utility that let’s you cycle through the opening of new stations since 1976:
Video Games (1975-2011)
21 Dec 2012Games by genre, and games by platform. Labeling the axis might have been useful – I assume it’s supposed to be percent of total, with the space at top “other”? I tried to find the original source for this, but had no luck.
Infographic Vector Graphics
In: Graphic Tools
20 Dec 2012Yes, I know everyone out there is a master at Illustrator and can create any image they want in mere moments. Ha! But why re-invent the wheel?!? There are a lot of cool free and pay collections of vector elements out there for re-purposing in your own creations.
First off, there’s one of my all-time personal favorites: The Noun Project. The simplicity of symbols convey a lot of power. The noun project usually has multiple versions of any noun you an think of. Some are free, some ask that you attribute the creator, and some are royalty-free for a fee.
If you don’t mind spending just a few bucks ($3-6 on average), head over to graphicriver and do a search for “infographic” or “charts”. Sure, a lot of the packages are full of tacky design – but remember, these are just time-saving ingredients for your next masterpiece.
If you are more comfortable with Photoshop, there are also decent bitmap based templates:
Why did I save the free ones for last? Because they aren’t very good, to be honest. Most of the free templates I found include only the most basic of shapes.
Anyone have any other recommendations?
Timeline Wizardry
20 Dec 2012Timelines are underutilized visualization tools – partially because they are a huge pain in the ass to create. Nate Kogan describes his experience using Timeline.Verite.Co’s nifty javascript timeline creation tool to convert stories stored in a google spreadsheet into a beautiful way to view history.
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