Author: Brendan Barry

  • Water on Demand

    Thanks, Brazilian tree forest company, for inspiring cities to provide us with water on demand. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • The Future of Climate Change

    At the end of the month the world will gather in Paris, France for the next round of climate change talks. In advance of the talks, the Financial Times put together this model of how emissions reductions will help—or not—get climate change under control. The piece is two-fold. The first is a ten-step narrative that…

  • The Relative Value of Republican Primary Votes

    The day after Election Day—no, not that Election Day—we take a look at a nice scatter plot from FiveThirtyEight. They explore how an eventual conservative candidate, whoever that may be, will face a structural challenge. There are slightly more delegates at play in blue states than red. And typically those blue Republicans are “less religious,…

  • 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. So I decided to scrap today’s blog post and instead spend all of five minutes tweaking this to make it a bit…

  • Paul Ryan is Your New Speaker

    Paul Ryan is about to takeover for John Boehner as Speaker of the House. So the Washington Post put together a nice graphic-featuring article about how Ryan compares to previous speakers—turns out he is fairly young. But the end of the piece uses this graphic to look at the number of days, i.e. experience, each…

  • Sailing Through Southeast Asian Waters

    Today the US sent a guided missile destroyer through what China claims—but few recognise as—its sovereign territory, twelve nautical miles off the coast of semi-artificial islands. This piece from Quartz illustrates just some of the overlapping claims of the Spratley Islands. In the end, nothing happened to the destroyer as China did not counter it…

  • English Votes for English Laws

    Last week the British government announced plans to solve the West Lothian Question that centres on devolution parity for England. Many legislative powers have been devolved from London and given to the regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. And on the one hand that is great as the national parliament no longer tells…

  • Helvetica vs. Arial

    Today’s post comes via a friend. We look at a video comparing the details of two typefaces: Helvetica vs. Arial. Happy Friday, everybody. Credit for the piece goes to Charles Cultrara.

  • Trump Leads the Pack

    The day after the Canadian elections, let’s turn our gaze back upon the states via this Washington Post piece. How are the Republicans doing in their primaries? Yep, still the land of I can’t quite believe it. Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

  • The Canadian Elections

    Canada held an election yesterday. For your briefing on it, John Oliver did a great job on Last Week Tonight. But for the serious coverage, we have results. Here we have the results coverage by the National Post. It’s your standard choropleth coloured by the victor in each riding, or constituency. From a design side,…