Chart Porn

The Rise of the Filibuster

Dustin — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:23:29 +0000

To understand this chart you have to be quite the congressional procedure wonk. I think they should at least have to go back to having to talk the whole time. While standing on one foot. In uncomfortable shoes. With their mom watching.

Women in Parliament

Dustin — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:16:45 +0000

We’ve looked at female world leaders before. Here are some stats on representation (well, what is supposed to be representation).

Presentation Charts

Dustin — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:56 +0000

I’ve had these conversations.

Repetitive Tasks

Dustin — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:58:03 +0000

Yep. This pretty much describes my career. Progress is the result of a lazy man finding an easier way of doing things.

Gay Rights

Dustin — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:34:41 +0000

A nice interactive visualization of gay rights in the United States, by State. This was created by the Guardian in the UK – where, interestingly, the conservatives support gay rights.

Why Do I Feel Thirsty?

Dustin — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:10:00 +0000

This visualization shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of the Earth’s water compared to the size of the Earth. Yikes! That’s a lot of dirt and rock!

Thanks to D. Cramer for emailing me the link!

Fashion Color Forecaster

Dustin — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:02:32 +0000

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)

Fortune 500

Dustin — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:06:21 +0000

The 2012 Fortune 500 is out (which basically rates companies by revenue). I like this presentation of sales vs profits:

There in also a charting of the Top 10 that let’s you take a look at revenue vs profits:

What Makes it Worth While

Dustin — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:04:28 +0000

I receive so many emails full of marketing-speak and copies of horrible link-bait infoposters I almost overlooked the below email from a fan:

Dear Dustin

I’m a teacher in Kenya. We struggle to get textbooks and our internet is very slow, but I wanted to thank you for your wonderful site which enables me to share brilliant graphics and thought provoking data with my students. Out here in Sub saharan Africa we sometimes feel a bit peripheral to what is going on in the rest of the world, but your images help our kids to feel in touch (and save busy teachers a lot of time trawling through the net)

Thanks again

It feels so good to know my work here is accomplishing more than providing fodder for snarky graphic designers and bloggers.

Update: Scale of the Universe

Dustin — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:24:54 +0000

Cary and Michael Huang have updated their zoomable scale of everything (first seen in 2010). The graphics are nicer and smoother, they’ve replaced the annotations with a scale in the corner, and everything can be clicked on for popup detail. Thankfully, they also now let you turn off the dreadful music. Thanks to Shrub for sending me the link!

The Illusion of Choice

Dustin — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:57:18 +0000

This has been making the rounds lately. I find it as interesting to look at the minimalist design inherent in modern logos as the ownership concentrations.

Science Fiction to Reality Timeline

Dustin — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:55:22 +0000

When scientific advances were first theorized vs when they became reality. After a close viewing I would say whoever wrote this wasn’t particularly well-read, or even a very good geek – a lot of things on both sides are just plain wrong. Great idea. Crappy execution. Anybody want to try their hand at a version that includes da Vinci, Verne, and Heinlein (just for starters).

Coin World

Dustin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:38:21 +0000

An art project map of the world crafted from each countries coins.

Elegant Growth

Dustin — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:48:12 +0000

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:

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.

Evolution of a Political Map

Dustin — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:50:33 +0000

A nice progression of intermediate steps in preparing a newspaper map of Santorum’s campaign, using R.