Innovative Archive:

Some beautiful visualizations of where each player shoots from, and is more successful (this is last year’s season, though)

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Raw is a pretty cool (and free!) online tool for creating vector outputs of uncommon visualizations. You copy and paste your data, select a few options, and it cranks out the visualization. What’s so nice is that it doesn’t stop there – you can then save it in svg output, and then take that into Illustrator or other vector editing software for finishing touches. It’s nice to see free tools that understand that some users need professional quality outputs. Of course, you can also just download a PNG version and throw it up on the web if you want. 

The speed at which it generates the charts is also pretty impressive considering the complexities.

Treemaps with adjustable colors, size, etc:

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Alluvial charts:

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Dendrograms:

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Circular dendrograms:

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Scatter, bubble, and packed circle charts:

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and Binned hexagons:

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I have to given them credit, although this is essentially still just linkbait content-wise, the animated presentation of the information is innovative and really does keep your attention. Well done. This almost needs a new name: storygraphic?

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Lots of books try to convince us that different colors are associated with different emotions and messages, but John Nelson decided to put google image search results to the test. Check out the comments for some good discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the technique.

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Every once in a while you discover something that is obviously useful, but for some reason, you never even considered it before. That happened to me today in the form of graph digitizing software. Basically, it lets you create a chart in reverse: it starts with an image of an existing chart, and extracts the data. Why is this useful? Well, sometimes you find a great chart and want to use it for a project, but you don’t have access to the original dataset (it’s lost in time, etc). I’ve gotten around this in the past by tracing images in vector software – but obviously, extracting the data provides more precision and flexibility.

There are several digitizing programs out there, but I like Graphclick because it works with multiple chart types and has a simple interface (though it only works on Macs). Un-Scan-It is a nice one that works on PCs and Macs (but is a bit expensive).

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With the conference release of iOS 7 yesterday, there is much talk about it’s “flat design”. What is flat design? Designmodo has a nice article explaining the basics.

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While I generally love flat design concepts, Apple really choked on some of the implementation – particularly the icon designs. Check out photos, newstand, game center, and settings below. Barf. They are the way too cluttered busy and abstract – the exact opposite of what they should be.

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Using location data from over 1 million photos taken by astronauts on the International Space Station provides us with another “revealed” map of the world. These big data meta analysis generally annoy me, but for some reason when they are done on a map I find them downright artistic.

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The author, Nathan Bergey, has additional breakdown maps by mission, etc on his website if you’re interested.

A cool real time synced visualization of guitar riffs and their matching tabs notations. Apparently the Soundslice site let’s you annotate any youtube video in such a way. I love internet functionality mashups like this.

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Fantastic flow chart from the NYT showing what happens depending on which way swing states go.

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Feels like a music video for a slogan, using meaningless animated infographics.

Getting Lost from Marco Bagni – LostConversation on Vimeo.

To be honest, I get submitted so many crap info-posters, I almost didn’t catch this one. Lots of interesting content, and the animation is a nice aesthetic innovation (though probably not really necessary, of course).

Cheetah: Nature's Speed Machine, by Jacob O'Neal

In related news, the Washington DC Zoo has had a steady crop of adorable cheetah cubs the past few years. Click the link for some awww-some pictures.

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Every once in a while you stumble upon an obsessive hobby niche with some really stunning visualizations. Today’s obsession: Avengers comic books and the work of Jer Thorp. It turns out that there is a massive database of comic book metadata to work with.

The covers of every Avengers issue:
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Who appears in each issue, by date:

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Jer goes on to look at Avengers by first appearance, sex, robot, gods, and in part II who appeared more, who created the characters, and so on. I only wish he had shared more about how he built the visualization tools.

The Pimkie clothing company has come up with an interesting real-time fashion indicator: They video what people are wearing as they walk down the street in Paris, Milan, and Antwerp (supposed fashion capitals), and analyze what color pixels are moving. You can then look at the findings in real time, for yesterday, last week, or last month. Apparently, peach-ish red is huge right now in Paris. (via StoryTellingWithData)

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Coin World

In: Innovative Maps

20 Apr 2012

An art project map of the world crafted from each country’s coins.

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Sometimes you have to strangle software to get what you want. I was looking for a new way to compare world growth across analytical groups. Starting with an excel bubble chart, I noticed that sorting the values by growth rate, and sizing them by GDP value, produces a very beautiful visualization of the distribution. Looking closer, however, I noticed that excel literally draws the graph in the sorted order (lowest to highest in this case), resulting in some of the smaller balls being hidden by the larger ones:

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To fix this turned out to be quite complicated, requiring some software hopping. First you have to copy and paste the chart into Powerpoint, then right-click/save-as-picture into an enhanced metafile (.emf), which you can then open in Illustrator where you can bring all the hidden balls to the front. Anyways, the end result is below. I hope the technique is useful to anyone looking to do some post-production excel chart tweaking.

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