Chart Porn

2000 years of Global Temperatures

Dustin — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:38:21 +0000

Interesting scientific work, building on prior studies from across the world. Rather than get into the findings in detail I refer you to the NYT article and a very detail FAQ at the authors’ website)

Jobs in America (2001-2011)

Dustin — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:27:35 +0000

A lot of tree maps are gibberish. This one drives home the structural changes in the job market quite clearly. It’s part of Catherine Mulbrandon’s awesome book “An Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States”. I highly recommend her book – whether it’s for the insightful content, or for the 130+ beautiful examples of clean design.

The Art of Data Visualization

Dustin — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:15:09 +0000

A nice introductory video from PBS with Edward Tufte, Julie Steele, Josh Smith, and Jer Thorp. Every once in a while it’s good to remind yourself of basic principles.

Geography of Hate

Dustin — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:04:15 +0000

This has been making the rounds. Based on 150,000 geocoded tweets from June 2012 to April 2013, filtered 1st by use of word, and then manually whether it was used in a negative or derogatory fashion.

Obviously this suffers from selection bias as it only includes people who bother to tweet, and those who aren’t ashamed to do it publicly. There’s also the usual population density distortion (last map below), which would be compounded by cell phone coverage out west. So, basically, this is another pretty visualization of social media meta data that doesn’t really mean much of anything. To be honest I’m surprised they only found 150,000 hateful tweets in 11 months. (The author’s FAQ is an interest read)

Homophobia:

Racist:

Disability:

Satellite GIFs

Dustin — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:09:31 +0000

It’s interesting how popular animated gifs have become again. I guess that even with high speed internet people are a little fed up with player load times and lags. Here GIFs are used to show time lapse satellite images of mankind’s impact on the earth. (google earth link)

No Means No

Dustin — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:05:37 +0000

[Pet peeve] I understand that all you social media consultants, SEO officers, and marketing experts out there have to do something to justify your salaries. But here’s a hint they probably left out of your last seminar: don’t annoy content managers with multiple emails about the same crappy content. I receive dozens of emails a day with suggested infographics. If I don’t like it, I don’t post it. It’s that simple. You will not talk me into liking it more by sending follow up emails. Do not “Just check in”, “want to follow up”, or “wonder if I was still considering.” I’m sorry I don’t have time to respond to each email – but I just don’t. The flow of crap is so high, and the number of good suggestions I get so low, I have been tempted to remove my email address from the website altogether. For now, repeat offenders will be added to the spam filter – or have their emails and lousy infographics brutally dissected in public – which I suppose could be a fun new Chartporn feature. [/Pet peeve]

Average Dissertation Length by Topic

Dustin — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:13:48 +0000

The R is my friend blog used some nifty coding to analyze 2,500+ dissertations (though only those since 2007). (via)

Most were between 100 and 200 pages.

The below boxplot shows the length by topic. It could have used a legend to verify, but traditionally, the vertical line is the median, the colored areas are the 1st and third quartiles, the horizontal line is the range of extreme values (1.5x the inter quartile from the upper and lower quartile, and the dots are outliers (greater than 1.5 the inter-quartile range). Make sense? Of course, page length doesn’t actually indicate much of anything… so this whole exercise is pointless – just like most PhDs.

Corporate Logo Evolution

Dustin — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:40:20 +0000

I love symbols and logos. It’s interesting how they change over time to reflect the times, marketing attempts, and mediums.

here are a few more:

Psychology of Color

Dustin — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:04:56 +0000

I usually don’t post banner infographics anymore (most of them are linkbait), but I liked how this one summarizes the basic concepts of color theory and provides iconic examples. Of course, there is way too much room given to the chakra color nonsense.

The aesthetic aspects of color in design are demonstrated in my friend Mitch’s collage piece of vintage advertisements:

Is it Worth the Time to be More Efficient?

Dustin — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:43:00 +0000

More awesomeness from xkcd. It needs a third axis to factor in how annoying the task is.

Geek Productivity

Dustin — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:37:27 +0000

Pretty accurate. Some people just don’t understand that performing at a high level requires some rest periods in between the productivity. Or maybe we really are just lazy – I can’t say for sure.

Facebook Image Dimensions

Dustin — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:21:37 +0000

I am always googling these, so it’s nice to have them all in one place. Of course, they will probably change in a week. Here’s an older one that includes sizes for additional services (google+, twitter, youtube, etc). Anyone know of a permanent repository?