From Let’s Tesselate: Hexagons For Tile Grid Maps by Danny DeBelius of the npr visuals team: As the saying goes, nothing is certain in this life but death, taxes and requests for geographic data to be represented on a map. For area data, the choropleth map is a tried and true visualization technique, but not without significant dangers […]
How pictures help you discover the unexpected.
From Nathan Yau in his book Visualize This: Visualization One of the best ways to explore and try to understand a large dataset is with visualization. Place the numbers into a visual space and let your brain or your readers’ brain find the patterns. We’re good at that. You can often find stories that you […]
Scott McCloud’s lesson on time in comics and what it means for infographics.
As a data designer and cartoonist, I have been heavily influenced by Scott McCloud’s book on Understanding Comics. The cool thing about his book is that many of the concepts can be applied very directly to infographics, even those that don’t employ comic style illustration. This is especially true when dealing with time. Using a comic’s […]
What Ann K Emery really thinks about clustered bar charts.
Today’s illustration was inspired by Ann K Emery’s blog post on six alternatives to the clustered bar chart. We can all agree that 3-d exploding pie charts are pretty rotten. My vote for worst chart? The clustered bar chart. I see clustered bar charts everywhere. E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E. On pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 of […]
ODI shares 10 things to know about evaluation, number 5 is on failures.
Today’s illustration was inspired by an infographic created by the Overseas Development Institute. 5. ‘Failures” are important. Evaluation is sometimes driven by desire to show that a project was successful or worthwhile. Yet evaluations will almost always show mixed results. Understanding and sharing what doesn’t work is just as important as what does.
Minimum Viable Explanation – cartoon flashback
Today’s cartoon flashback comes from a big Q&A post on blogging I pulled together a couple of years ago. Specifically from Nathan Yau‘s response when asked about his biggest blogging challenge. The biggest challenge with FlowingData is probably maintaining the right balance between academic and casual. If I get too technical, I confuse a lot […]