Swiss Coffee Exports

While I hate coffee, I do like sankey charts. And this piece from Quartz makes use of one when discussing the exports of coffee. In particular, the article focuses on the value that coffee manufactures, e.g. Nestle, add to Swiss imports of un-roasted beans before exporting them roasted. (Increasingly in little pods.) Overall, the piece is of a digestible length and worth a read. If you like coffee. Personally, I’m sticking with tea.

Swiss coffee exports
Swiss coffee exports

Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky.

Maps Being Useful

I often rail against the use of maps. I often hear “They’re pretty!” or “They’re colourful!” or “But I really do know where Guatemala is!” or “I can see my house!”. They’re often just a crutch, unless you can use them to show an actual geographic distribution. Thankfully from Quartz we get a series of small multiple maps that look at the geographic distribution of top trading partners for a select set of geographies.

Global trade
Global trade

For this set, I think the colours could be the same and perhaps the chosen country perhaps outlined or otherwise signalled on the map. (Only because my utter lack of faith in people being able to identify countries on a map.) Still, it’s a good piece overall that makes nice use of maps.

Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky.

Travelling for the World Cup

Well, travel for the teams, not you. It’s a big issue in Brazil because unlike the last couple of times, the teams need to travel big distances to reach the cities where they play their matches. Thankfully, to explain just how far some of these distances are for some of these teams, Quartz put together a nice article with quite a few graphics.

This graphic in particular juxtaposes the travels of the US team and the Argentinian team. Who do you think has it easier?

US and Argentinian travels
US and Argentinian travels

Credit for the piece goes to Jason Karaian and Ritchie King.

Cutting the Cable

We have all heard talk about cutting cable, i.e. unsubscribing from cable television. But the question is what is replacing it if anything? Fortunately, this really nice graphic produced by Quartz shows the market over the course of the last five years.

Cutting the cable
Cutting the cable

It is a really nice use of small multiples and the power of not overlapping size and growth charts, or combo-charts, just because you can. Different metrics deserve different charts. The important part is placement, and that’s where a good designer can make sure to place relevant data near its partner.

Credit for the piece goes to Ritchie King.

Kentucky Derby

The Kentucky Derby is this weekend, but your humble author is out until next week. So here is a work from David Yanofsky at Quartz that looks at the average horse times in the one and three-quarter miles at the Kentucky Derby. (I’m a baseball guy, so ask me about Pedro’s strikeout rates in the late 1990s and I’m much better equipped with answers.)

But he takes decade-long averages and shows how horse speeds have essentially plateaued since the 1960s.

Horse times
Horse times

Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky.

Immigrants’ Paths to Citizenship

Last week several important stories were drowned out by the bombings in Boston. One of those stories was that a group of senators agreed on a compromise immigration bill that would offer undocumented workers in the United States definite plans to citizenship. Of course now that we know the suspects in the Boston bombings were legal, documented immigrants—one of whom was a naturalised citizen—the immigration debate might take on an entirely different character.

Here is a cropping from a graphic put together by Quartz that explains how the different paths work.

Cropping of different paths to US citizenship
Cropping of different paths to US citizenship

Credit for the piece goes to Ritchie King.

US Trade Balance

The US imports a lot. But it does not export quite as much. The difference between those two figures is what is known as the balance of trade. Quartz looks at the US balance of trade not at an overall level, but between individual countries.

US Balance of Trade
US Balance of Trade

This is not one of my favourite pieces. For starters, while the overall figures are in the accompanying text, it would be useful to include total US imports and exports alongside the graphic as a point of reference.

Secondly, a long-standing issue I have is area comparisons. Sometimes they are needed and useful, a good example is a tree map. But in this piece, the circles do not add up to a recognisable whole. They also do not help when looking at individual countries and their historical trade values. A dotted outline of a circle shows the previous year’s trade. But more often than not, the trade level was so similar that the circles nearly overlap exactly.

The grouping and highlighting functionality hints at a useful application to explore US trade data, but the clumsiness of the circles renders that usefulness moot. .

Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky.