Productive Fridays

Funny story, a virus hit my workplace this week. And it basically cost us four days of work because nobody could actually access their work files. That made me remember this recent piece from xkcd, which is so very apropos at the end of this week.

Pro-fucking-ductive
Pro-fucking-ductive

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Redesigning the Turkish Election Results

Turkey held its elections over the weekend. And so on the way to work this morning I decided to check the results on the BBC. And I saw this graphic—screenshot from my phone.

The BBC results
The BBC results

So I decided to scrap today’s blog post and instead spend all of five minutes tweaking this to make it a bit clearer. Or, a lot clearer. Simple little tweaks can make all the difference in data clarity. Now you can visually see the scale of difference in the votes. You also don’t need to refer to a legend off to the side with tints of the same colour.

My results with their data
My results with their data

Credit for the original piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

The History and Future of Data Visualisation

From time to time in my job I hear the desire or want for more different types of charts. But in this piece by Nick Brown over on Medium, we can see that there are really only a few key forms and some are already terrible—here’s looking at you, pie charts. How new are some of these forms? Turns out most are not that new—or very new depending on your history/timeline perspective. Brown illustrated that timeline by hand.

A timeline of chart forms
A timeline of chart forms

Worth the read is his thoughts on what is new for data visualisation and what might be next. No spoilers.

Credit for the piece goes to Nick Brown.

Fast Food on the Internets

Let’s aim for something a bit lighter today. Well, lighter in all things but calories, perhaps. Today we have a piece from the Wall Street Journal that looks at the social media presence of several large fast food brands. Overall, it has a few too many gimmicky illustrations for my comfort. But, the strength of the piece is that it does look at some real data, e.g. plotted Twitter response rates, and then contextualises it with appropriate callouts.

Who cares about your tweets?
Who cares about your tweets?

The illustrations are killing me, though.

Credit for the piece goes to Marcelo Prince and Carlos A. Tovar.

Baseball’s Pace of Play and ESPN’s Pie in Their Face

Baseball is my sport. I love it. Some of my favourite games are the four-hour long matches between my Red Sox and the scourge of the Earth, the Yankees. Games can take a long time for a number of reasons. But in an increasingly fast-paced world, critics argue that younger generations do not have the patience for even three-hour games. So Major League Baseball this year is actively trying to reduce the time of games through pace-of-play improvements. To do this, they are looking at and collecting more of baseball’s copious amounts of data.

Unfortunately, ESPN in an article about the improvements for this year took the data and did nothing with it.

For the love of god, why?
For the love of god, why?

Above we have survey results. I want to vomit in my mouth. Wait, hold on…sorry about that, I am back now. Some organisations have done some really nice visualisations with baseball data, of which we have a lot because the sport plays 162 games per year. We surely could be looking at more timing data. But, instead we get three-dimensional pie charts from ESPN. The rest of the article is not much better, though their styling of bar charts still leaves things to be desired.

Credit for the piece goes to ESPN’s graphics department.

The American Shopping Mall

This past weekend Al-Shabab, the Al Qaeda affiliate based in Somalia, threatened shopping malls in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This threat carries a certain amount of weight given the deadly attack Al-Shabab launched against the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya a few years ago.

So what to look at today? Well, a few weeks back a colleague sent me a link to a Bloomberg article about the American shopping mall. The article examines the makeup of stores, the people shopping, and the regionalisation in the food court(s). On a personal note, I was glad to see that King of Prussia received a mention.

Auntie Anne's in KoP? I'd rather Philly Pretzel Factory
Auntie Anne’s in KoP? I’d rather Philly Pretzel Factory

Credit for the piece goes to Dorothy Gambrell and Patrick Clark.

Why I Became an Information Designer or: Why People Hate Watching Movies with Me

I don’t always watch pop culture. But on those occasions when I do, xkcd basically sums up why I became an information designer.

Reason No. 42 why I became an information designer
Reason No. 42 why I became an information designer

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Don’t Do This At Home…

In fact, don’t do this ever. Today’s bad chart comes from the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities. I saw it and could only shake my head and wonder why.

The Mayor's Office version
The Mayor’s Office version

Something more like this much more easily communicates the story.

My take on the data
My take on the data

Credit for the original piece goes to the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities.

The International Arms Trade

One of the possible set of sanctions against Russia by the United States and European Union would impact the country’s defence industries. This chart by the Economist shows how that might not have the most impact. Most of Russia’s arms exports go to China, India, and Algeria. None of whom are the United States or European Union.

International arms trade
International arms trade

Clearly I don’t love the pie charts. I would much rather have seen segmentation within the bars. Or a full-on Sankey diagram. But, the story is still worth telling.

Credit for the piece goes to R.L.W. and L.P.

Mobile Data Visualisation

Today’s post is not news-related for a change. (Don’t worry, I’ll likely get back to that next week.) Instead, we have a new collection of mobile data visualisations curated by Sebastian Sadowski. You can choose to see either smartphone or tablet visualisations and then filter by visual form.

Smartphone Data Visualisation
Smartphone Data Visualisation

Credit for the site goes to Sebastian Sadowski, to the various works to the various designers.