#thumbsupviz

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A line chart showing Super Bowl start times between 1967 and 2014. I like the simple annotations and title. See the tweet here.

- AKE

Interesting, and decently designed, but I'd like to see an explanation of why kickoff times bounced around in the 80s (East Coast vs West Coast venues?), and stabilized since 1991.

-RS

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Although Dataviz Purists may not support the use of dials, this one, mimicking a car's speedometer, adds valuable context to the numbers.

-AKE

Sometimes it makes sense to forego precision for a good metaphor.

-RS

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If you didn't see the New York Times' dialect quiz this winter, you must've been living under a rock. The quiz and its accompanying heat maps filled my Facebook newsfeed for several weeks. In case you missed it, here's a link to the quiz: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?_r=0

The maps were so clear and simple that the focus was on the findings, not on the visualization itself. Here's my heat map. Even though I grew up in the DC area, can you see the huge impact my South Dakotan parents have had on my speech?

-AKE

Another example of a Color Brewer palette, designed to match how humans perceive color.

-RS 

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Dataviz cartoons, is there anything better?!

-AKE

Nope.

-RS

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The NPR article says,

Whatever Friday's monthly jobs report says, it won't change the big picture. There are roughly 137 million jobs in this country. About two-thirds of those jobs are in private-sector services; the remaining third are split between goods-producing jobs (mainly manufacturing and construction) and government work (mostly at the state and local level).

Here's a closer look, drawn from the same data that the government collects for the monthly jobs report. (You can see this data, in glorious detail, here.)

This chart is exemplary because its designer has transformed dozens of tables of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics into a simple, easy-to-read graphic. The color-coding is easy to follow at a glance (e.g., blue for government, red for goods, green for services). It's also a lot more fun to explore than a bar chart.

-AKE

What I think is special about this particular treemap is the labeling. Maybe people insert extra space for the labels, which disturbs the actual graphic proportions of the data. Or, they can't fit the labels, so they create crazy abbreviations. The transparent larger labels is a really nice touch.

-JS

Agreed. Very nicely done.

-RS

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Don't underestimate the power of a simple density map to engage your readers. This one, Where Humans Live, has over 1,000 retweets and nearly 1,000 favorites on Twitter. The content is so simple, yet I'm not sure I've ever seen a density map of the world population like this before.

And here's a link to the tweet: https://twitter.com/Fascinatingpics/status/422115486839873536

-AE

I made the original version of this population density map for the NASA Earth Observation site. The color palette is Color Brewer OrRd, scaled logarithmically from 1 to 10,000 persons per square kilometer. Logarithmic scaling shows detail in regions with both high and low population density, and is useful for many data sets with values that vary widely.

Ordinarily I discourage the cylindrical projection, but the maps on NEO are intended to be re-used in other 3D and cartopgraphic applications. 

-RS

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This interactive graphic from the Washington Post can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/15/the-kids-arent-alright-an-infographic/

Viewers can scroll over the icons (like per-capita GDP and infant mortality) to compare metrics across different countries. The results are pretty clear - Africa and China are in bad shape across almost every measure. 

I'm not sure the red-green distinctions are color-blind friendly, and I'd love to view this chart a little larger, but it's generally a strong graphic -- easy to explore and understand, and much more engaging than a text-heavy article would've been. I also appreciate the headline and explanatory text, which gives just the right amount of context to the data.

- AKE

This graphic makes good use of a modified rainbow palette: the red-yellow-blue transition connotes "alarming" to "soothing", and the categories are only semi-quantitative, so the changing contrast across the spectrum isn't much of a problem.

-RS

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As NCAA realignment continues, this graphic from the New York Times does a nice job of tracing out the changes. Notice also the "sparkline" in the text at the top, a subject Andy Kirk from Visualisingdata.com discussed in a recent blog post. 

JS