Thumbs Up Viz

Exemplary Visualizations. (The lighter side of WTFviz.)

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A scale is one of the elements that separates a visualization from a picture. Not always easy, especially from an extreme perspective, or if the background of an image is 200 miles away from the foreground.

David McClure elegantly solves this problem by including familiar (to North Americans, at least) objects on a photograph taken from orbit. The solouhette of a six-foot-tall man corresponds to the scale in the foreground (the Agena Target Vehicle), and an outline of Manhattan gives a sense of the size of Isla San Jose and the Baja California Coast.

-RS

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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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Another exceptional graphic from the Wall Street Journal. The original is located here: https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/429709177926471680

I love the underlying photograph with the circle charts on top. It's engaging to the everyday reader rather than looking like a boring, scientific chart. 

Although Dataviz Purists won't support the use of circles in this chart, can you imagine the same visualization with bars instead of circles? It wouldn't work. 

-AKE

Dataviz purists (like me) will certainly mention that the area of a circle isn't they best way to convey quantity, but that's offset by the striking impression of the circles, reminiscent of targets.

-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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There have been a lot of strong heat maps lately. This one, tweeted here, shows how poor kids growing up in the South are especially unlikely to climb out of poverty.

Great features include:

The 6-word headline highlights the key finding

The red/blue color scheme (rather than red/green) is color blind friendly

Only a few key cities are annotated, so the map isn't overly cluttered with details

-AKE

Any use of the Color Brewer palettes gets a thumbs up from me (although I'll point out that it's an application of a difference palette to a sequential dataset: the bright yellow acts as a center point from which the darker blues and reds diverge).

-RS

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Good design is timeless. Despite being released in 2009, when interactive infographics were in their infancy (this is Internet time after all), this NPR visualization of the U.S. electric grid remains state-of-the-art. The color palette varies smoothly, the map projection maintains area, and the detailed overlay (power transmission lines) complements the state-level data. Notice how state boundaries are shown with negative space (white), so they don't conflict with the power lines. The rest of the visualization is just as well-designed, and worth studying. 

- 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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This small multiples chart, from Pew Research, has been making the rounds on Twitter --- not for its visualization techniques, but because its content is inspiring discussions and debates. Isn't that what we're all trying to do -- make a chart so simple that readers understand the content immediately and look past the chart design and into the content?

From a visualization perspective, this chart does several things well:

There's a simple title and a subtitle that provides more details about the data source

The column headers are images of clothing styles rather than words describing those clothing styles

The % sign isn't repeated, so there's less clutter

Thanks to the light gray bars, you can immediately spot which clothing style was preferred - Woman 4 - and this small multiples style is much faster to read than a table alone would've been

The median is shown at the bottom

View the original chart here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/08/what-is-appropriate-attire-for-women-in-muslim-countries/

-AKE

The cartoons used to illustrate the different styles of dress would be fantastic alone, and the quantitative bars put it over the top. Maybe the best chart we've posted.

-RS

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College Career Paths

Sankey diagrams are awesome for showing movement and flow but I rarely seem them applied to appropriate data. Here, the diagram shows movement from majors (on the left) to job fields (on the right). Click through to explore - hovering shows some detail and clicking on a path shows even more. Notes say it was made with D3.

-SE

This comes up as a tiny thumbnial for me--is that true for anyone else? (It gets bigger when I click on it). I'd also like a link, since the text is too small to read. Aside from that:

I like the balance of density of data on this chart and clarity. It shows majors, careers, numbers of graduates, and numbers employed in each career, all without feeling too cluttered.

-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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Interesting scatterplot from the Washington Post of NCAA Men's basketball bubble teams. The fact that scatterplots have become commonplace in major newspapers and magazines suggests something about our graphic literacy.

-JS

It's interesting that the graphics on sports pages--which (along with the business section) are the most data-rich in a newspaper--still feature heavily decorated charts with sparse data. That said, the school logos function as effective icons, and the data that is displayed represents a sophisticated analysis.

-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

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This display on one of the newest Warsaw trams shows a wealth of information: where you've been, where you are, where you're going, and how long it will take to get there. Nice to know in a foreign city.

RS

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Despite the rarity of solar eclipses, and the small number of satellites observing Earth, there are quite a few pictures of eclipses from orbit. This visualization of the annular solar eclipse on November 3, 2013 combines a satellite image with the path of the eclipse, which gives context to the gradations of the Moon’s shadow.

(I produced this image for NASA’s Earth Observatory.)

-RS