Author: Brendan Barry

I am a graphic designer who focuses on information design. My day job? Well, they asked me not to say. But to be clear, this blog is my something I do on my own time and does not represent the views of…my employers. I think what I can say is that given my interest in information design—be it in the shape of clear charts, maps, diagrams, or wayfinding systems—I am fortunate that my day job focuses on data visualisation. Outside of work, I try to stay busy with personal design work. Away from the world of design, I have become an amateur genealogist and family historian. You will sometimes see that area of work bleed into my posts.

Three-dimensional Charts Are Back, Baby

I thought three-dimensional charts died back in the 2010s. Alas, here we are in 2024 and I have to discuss one once again. have been following the Titan Inquiry this week and the opening presentation included this gem of data visualisation.

To be fair, I do not know how many designers, let alone specialist information designers, the US Coast Guard had or made available to create a clear and compelling chart and presentation, but…this is not it. First I will go through a number of points and then, when I had written about half of the post this morning, I decided it would simply be easier to put a white box over the main chart area and just recreate the graphic myself.

Unfortunately, after digging around, I could not find the actual dive depth data the Coast Guard used and so I essentially traced out the chart by hand. Not ideal, but for proof of concept as to how this chart could have been improved…I think my reinterpretation ssuffices.

To start, the chart sits on the slide with a drop shadow. Drop shadows are not all bad. They create perceived depth between an object and it’s background. The interwebs love them. I have used them. But I do not understand why here the chart needs a drop shadow to sit on the slide. Especially since the shadow pushes the chart “above” the deck, only for the three-dimensional bar chart to push the data “below” the chart’s surface, which means the chart data is being represented on the slide surface.

Deep breath.

The chart background features some kind of coloured gradient that became pixellated upon export and import into the PowerPoint deck.

The type was too small that it too became pixellated and grainy to the point that the dive labels are illegible. I would argue labelling each dive beyond its number is unnecessary in the context of Titan’s final dive, but without having listened to the presentation I cannot say for certain.

Next we have the third-dimension. It adds nothing and creates more coloured areas—because the dimension is fake, this a two-dimensional representation of three dimensions—that distract the eye from the important dimension, the length of the bar.

After that, we can look at the axis labels. First, there are far too many. Second, the maximum depth labelling makes no sense. Sometimes, if a line or a bar exceeds the chart maximum once or twice by a small amount, you can let it poke above the top—in this case bottom—line. If you know the rules, you know when you can break the rules. Here, however, the maximum label is 3800 metres.

But Titanic rests at 3840. Ergo 13 different measurements will need to sit below the chart’s maximum—minimum, technically—axis line.

Deep breath.

If she rests at 3840 metres, just add 60 to the chart minimum and you will ahve a final axis label of 3900 metres. Look carefully, however, and you will see in the bottom left how after the final white line, the chart keeps going. Clearly, the designers knew the chart needed more space. This unlabelled minimum is probably 3900 metres given the 100-metre increments used throughout.

But, however, if you add 160 metres to the chart you have a nice, round, divisible number of 4000, which means you do not need to mark the depths in 100-metre increments. It means all the bars sit within the chart. It means fewer pixels on the slide to distract the eyes. (Especially if you drop the background colour.)

Furthermore, if you look carefully at the green boxes, which represent successful dives to Titanic, you can see how the bars break the dimensional rules and are actually flat two-dimensional bars. Perhaps this was only noticeable to me as I worked off the downloaded file at a high-level of zoom to try and figure out the depths as precisely as possible. Or perhaps it is an artifact of the pixellated export of the graphic. If the latter, more of a reason not to make the thing a three-dimensional bar chart.

Then we can get to the colours.

Deep breath.

To start, red-green colour blindness is a thing. I harp on this often and so I will not rehash everything here. No, it does not mean all green and red combinations will not work, one just needs to be careful with them. This one comes pretty close to not working so I would have avoided it.

Secondly, just look at the red. I mean, how can you not. It is very bright and draws your eye almost immediately to all those red bars, particularly the one nearly a fifth of the way in from the right edge. That one is next to one of the successful Titanic dives. My first thought? Oh, that was the final dive. Wrong.

Red means non-Titanic dives. Again, I have not listened to the presentation, but these would presumably be dives of relatively less importance than the Titanic dives. I would not have made the less important dives the one colour that stands out the most.

If you want to go green represents successful Titanic dives and red represents unsuccessful Titanic dives, that makes sense. I can understand the design decision. (Though you would still need to ensure the shades work with each other.) In that case maybe the blue bars represent non-Titanic dives.

Instead, here blue represents unsuccessful dives to Titanic, which of course means the final dive, which of course includes the inquiry’s raison d’être. Not only that, the chart’s background is also blue, which makes visually separating the bars from the background more difficult. This is particularly true at the sides of the chart where the gradient leaves the darker blue.

Finally we have a little orange box with some tiny type pointing out the final dive’s depth. That bit, more visible than the green and orange bars, was still lost to me behind the red bars.

And breathe.

All in all, a mess.

As I noted at the top, halfway through I decided this was such a mess I would prefer just to show how the chart could have been designed. It took a little over an hour to make the chart. Clearly I do not have the chart style guidelines for the Coast Guard, so I just chose a typeface I think worked and then picked some reasonable colours from the deck.

Call me biased, but my design substantially improves the chart. First, you can read the text. Second, the colours fit the brand, do not distract from and in fact highlight the final dive. If I started from scratch, I would prefer to use what looks like the full content area of the PowerPoint slide, but I simply traced over the existing chart. I.e., ideally the chart would have been a little bit taller. I did have to cut out the labels for each dive, but as I stated earlier, they were illegible.

Credit for the original piece goes to the US Coast Guard.

Credit for my reinterpretation goes to me.

To X or Not to X

As it happens, the Latino culture largely remains x’ed out on using the term Latinx, according to a new survey from Pew Research.

The issue of supplanting Latino/Latina with Latinx as a gender neutral replacement—or as a complementary alternative—emerged in the general discourse in that oh-so-fun year of 2020 when everything went well.

One common argument I have heard is the inherent gender within the Spanish language. Broadly you use -o for singular masculine endings and -a for singular feminine forms and -os for plural masculine and mixed gender forms and -as for plural feminine forms.

Perhaps my biggest issue is that -x does not linguistically make sense. X is typically pronounced like a j or sometimes an s. Consider how Mexicans pronounce Mexico, May-hie-co. Latinx becomes La-teen-h, an almost silent ending that does not fit, at least to my ears. Pero, hablo solo un pocito Español. Aprendí a hablar por cuatro años en la escuela, dos años de niño, y trabaja en una cocina del restaurante. Thus Latinx, pronounced Lat-in-ecks, always seemed, daresay, a gringo solution to a problem that earlier polling of Latino communities did not indicate was a problem. With the potential exception of the young, but even then not terribly so.

Four years later, however, and not much has changed according to Pew. Their graphic shows as much.

Significantly more people are aware of Latinx as a term. Fewer people use the term, though not significantly. Although a shift from four to three percent can be seen as significant given its low adoption. Moreover, as a second graphic shows, more people who are aware of the term think it should not be used.

The article continues with a discussion of a new new alternative, Latine, which to my ears makes more sense. But is largely yet unheard of in the community—20%—and of those who have heard it, almost nobody uses it.

As far as the graphics go, I am not a huge fan.

For the first, we have two lines showing the movement between two datapoints. At the most basic level, the use of a line chart makes sense to depict two series moving between two points in time. But without any axis labelling one can only trust the lines begin and end at the correct position. Furthermore people need to read the specific labels to get a sense of the line charts’ magnitude. More of a tell, don’t show approach. If the chart had even a simple 0% line and 50% line, one need not label all four datapoints to convey the scale of the graphic.

Ultimately, though, does a chart with four datapoints even need to be graphed? Some would argue in most instances a dataset with fewer than five or six numbers need not be visualised; a table should suffice. Broadly I agree. This chart does show a particularly striking trend of increasing awareness of the term, but largely static to declining usage.

The second graphic, however, falls more squarely into that argument’s camp of “Why bother?” It shows simply two numbers. Numbers placed atop purple rectangles. Without any axis labelling, we presume these bars represent columns encoding the percent—at least the lines in the first chart were clearer to their meaning. Then we still have the issue of telling and not showing. Perhaps labelling to the left from 0% to 75% or 80% would help. Then you need not even add additional “ink” with the four digits sitting atop the bars and sparkling for unnecessary reader attention.

This falls into a broader trends I have witnessed over the last few years in the information design and data visualisation field of labelling individual datapoints within a chart. It is a trend with which I strongly disagree, but perhaps is best left for another post another day. Suffice it to say, if knowing the precise measurement is important, a chart is not the best form. For that use case I would opt for a table, best used to organise and find specific datapoints.

Overall, Pew shows that within the Latino community, very few use the term Latinx. Consequently, perhaps this entire post is, to use a Spanish-language expression, a tempest in a teapot.

Credit for the piece goes to Pew Research.

Life Aboard the International Space Station

This weekend I read a neat little article from the BBC about astronauts’ lives aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This comes on the heels of two NASA astronauts being left on the station due to some uncertainty about their Boeing spacecraft’s safety. The article featured a number of annotated photographs and illustrations, but this was my favourite.

The designers do a nice job of highlighting the particular components/sections of the station. This was my favourite as they darkened the non-relevant sections—looking at you solar panels.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

248 Years Later, Philadelphia’s Still Hosting Debates

For those of you living under a rock, 2024 is a presidential election year in the United States and the campaign for the November election truly kicks off post-Labour Day. And post-Labour Day here we are.

Tonight features a presidential debate between the two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Harris looks to be the first sitting vice president to win election since 1988 and Trump the first non-consecutive, two-term president since Grover Cleveland, who lost his election in 1888 only to return to office four years later.

Philadelphia has long played an outsized role in the constitutional construction of the nation given the city’s primacy in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But despite the city’s hosting of the debate, its first opportunity in nearly 50 years, the Commonwealth, a critical swing state in the electoral college, will be won in the suburbs and the smaller cities.

Enter this article about the growing role of Harrisburg’s suburbs. Harrisburg sits on the left bank of the Susquehanna River, one of the world’s oldest rivers, and is the Commonwealth’s capital, despite hearing innumerable times when I lived in Chicago that the capital was either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. After all, someone has to referee between the East Coast in Philadelphia, (arguably) the Midwest in Pittsburgh, and the Commonwealth’s middle. A middle described at times as Pennsyltucky or sometimes as Trumpsylvania, but forever best known by James Carville’s quote, “between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the Blacks” or simplified to Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.

Harrisburg, located within Dauphin County, is one of the few growing regions of the Commonwealth. And as I pointed out in my 2020 piece about Trumpsylvania, Dauphin County is one of the few counties in south-central Pennsylvania bucking the trend of the Trumpification of Pennsyltucky, the T that sits across the top of the Commonwealth. I have not updated my analysis since the 2020 election, but just venture west of Paoli, as Carville suggested, and you will see the reddest of red counties. But not in Dauphin.

The Inquirer’s article examines the shifting electoral demographics in detail, focusing more on Cumberland County, which sits across the Susquehanna from Harrisburg in a far redder county. Granted, as my analysis showed from 2000 to 2016, Cumberland moved significantly Democratic, but in 2024 I think it best considered a stretch target.

In this choropleth map we can see the change in results at the precinct level. Anecdotally from stories I hear in Philadelphia, this makes sense given the growth in the suburbs around Harrisburg. And given Pennsylvania’s rural population continues to shrink and its urban and suburban populations continue to grow, the long-term success of Democrats will likely be tied to getting places like Dauphin to deepen in their blue and Cumberland to become a bit more purply of a red.

Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to Aseem Shukla.

Electric Throat Share

For the last few weeks I have been working on my portfolio site as I update things. (Note to self, do not wait another 15 years before embarking upon such an update.)

At the University of the Arts (requiescat in pace), I took an information design class wherein I spent a semester learning about the electricity generation market in the Philadelphia region. This became a key part of my portfolio when I applied for 99 jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession, had 3 interviews, and only 1 job offer.

That job offer lead me to Chicago and Euromonitor International where one of the first projects I worked on was a datagraphic about throat share, i.e. what drinks products/brands people in different countries drank. Essentially, I took what I learned about visualising the share of electricity generation in Pennsylvania to the share of drinks consumption across the world. Thus a career was born. Fast forward 15 years and I wanted to see how that electricity generation had changed. And I can do that because I used a public source in the US Energy Information Administration.

Anecdotally, Pennsylvanians know fracking for natural gas has been a boon to the former coal and steel parts of the Commonwealth, which really is a lifeline. But overall, Pennsylvania has long been known as a nuclear power state. More on that from a personal standpoint in a later post. Back in the uphill both ways to university day, I did not look at the United States overall. But now I can.

Largely this fits with the narratives I know. Coal has plummeted both in the Commonwealth and more broadly as natural gas has largely taken its place. No, that’s not great from a climate change perspective, but natural gas is definitely better than coal.

Renewables, nationally speaking, are now about 20% or 1/5th our net electricity generation. But in Pennsylvania, whilst this Monday morning might be a bright and blue sky day great for solar power, the nights are getting longer and we get a lot of clouds. We do have some hydroelectric dams—it helps to be a partially mountainous state. And, yes, we do have the wind farms along the Allegheny Ridge, one of the windiest spots along the East Coast, but for context one of the two nuclear reactors near to which I grew up is equal to almost the entire wind power electricity generation in the entire Commonwealth.

But for all the supposed growth in renewables, we just are not seeing it in Pennsylvania, at least not at a scale to supplant fossil fuels. And unfortunately, it is not as if demand is falling. And that might be why we are seeing quiet talks about reactivating some of Pennsylvania’s shuttered nuclear reactors. If you could bump that nuclear share of electric throat back up to 40% or even 50%, you could cut down that natural gas usage significantly.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Electing An Expert in Nameology

Congratulations on making it to Friday. Though it was a short week for my American audience.

Now that the State’s Labour Day holiday has passed, the 2024 electoral season can begin in earnest. And to begin the insanity we have a helpful graphic from xkcd.

Clearly I’m not cut out for high office with a name of seven letters.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

I Want a Pitcher Not a Back o’ Head Hitter

We’re about to go into the sportsball realm, readers. Baseball, specifically.

Tuesday night, Atlanta Braves batter Whit Merrifield was hit in the back of the head by a 95 mph fastball. Luckily, modern ballplayers wear helmets. But at that velocity, one does not have the most reaction time in the world a number of other batters have been hit in the face. And generally, that’s not good. Merrifield went off in post-game interviews about the lack of accountability on the pitchers’ side. From my perspective as an armchair ballplayer, back in my day, when I walked up hill through the snow both ways to get to my one-room schoolhouse, if you hit a batter, our pitcher was hitting one of yours.

I have noticed in ballgames, however, I see hit-by-pitch (HBP) more often—and I score most ballgames I attend, so I have records. But I also know a handful attended per year makes for a very small sample size. Nonetheless, I know I have talked to other baseball friends and brought up that I think pitchers throw with less command, i.e. throwing strikes, than they used to, because I see more HBP in the box scores. And when I go to minor league ballgames, which I do fairly often, HBP seems on the rise there, which means in future years those same pitchers will likely be in the majors.

So yesterday morning, I finally took a look at the data and, lo and behold, indeed, since my childhood, the numbers of HBPs has increased.

There is one noticeable sharp dip and that is the 2020 COVID-shortened season. Ignore that one. And then a smaller dip in the mid-90s represents the 114-game and 144-game seasons, compared to the standard 162 per year. Nonetheless, the increase is undeniable.

There is a general dip in the curve, which occurs in the late 200s and early 2010s, with its nadir in 2012. Without doing more research, that was probably the peak of pitchers, who could command—throw strikes—and control—put their strikes where they want in the strike zone—their pitches at the sacrifice of velocity.

2014 saw the rise of the dominant Royals bullpen, which changed the course of modern baseball. Stack your bullpen with a number of power arms who throw 100 mph and just challenge batters to hit the speedball. Problem is, not everyone who can throw 100 knows where that speedball is going. And that leads to more batters being hit.

Merrifield is correct in his assessment that until pitchers and teams face consequences for hitting batters, we are not likely to see a decrease in HBPs. Or at least not until velocity is de-emphasised for some other reason. What if there were a rule a pitcher who hits a batter from the shoulder up is immediately ejected? What if a long-term injury for a batter is tied to a long-term roster removal for the pitcher? If, say, the batter hit in the head is out for a month with a concussion, the same pitcher is on the restricted list for a month?

Have I worked through any of these ideas in depth? Nope. Just spitballing here on ye olde blog. But as my chart shows, it does not look like this potentially life-changing problem in the game is going away anytime soon.

Credit for the piece is mine.

I Didn’t Predict a Riot

Yesterday I wrote about a BBC graphics locator map that was perhaps not as helpful as possible. Well today I want to talk about another BBC map, though not in as critical a fashion.

I landed upon this map whilst reading a series of updates about last month’s anti-immigrant riots throughout the United Kingdom—principally England.

The graphic uses small multiples of a cropping of the United Kingdom, excluding most of Northern Ireland and a good bit of Scotland. Red dots highlight where, on a particular date, far-right riots erupted. As the reader moves further into time, the red dots become a dark grey.

In general, I think this graphic works really well. The designer does not label every city and town as it’s not necessary so long as you hit the big and most notable ones. Nonetheless I have two peccadilloes with the graphic.

First, and the minor of the two, is the grey dots could perhaps be toned down a wee bit. Or fade as tints as they recede into the past.

Secondly, the note at the bottom of the graphic indicates “[t]here were no recorded incidents of unrest on Thursday 1 August”. Correspondingly, the graphic lacks a map for 1 August. If I had designed the graphic, I would have included a blank map for that date, because its emptiness could tell part of the story as sometimes nothing is something.

A blank map on Thursday could show that a brief flare up after the incident in Southport had, at best, burned out or, at worst, cooled to a simmer. Something then happened likely Friday night—after a day with only two reported incidents—or Saturday morning, which prompted a weekend of riots and destruction across the United Kingdom.

What could that be? Social media. Surprise, surprise. The BBC had a good article about the potential inflammatory aspect of social media posts on the reignition of the hatred the weekend of 3–4 August. Imagine a blank map for 1 August and a caption that notes a series of posts on, say, 2 or 3 August, followed by the red dots all across northern England.

As I said at the outset, however, I like the piece overall. Just a few small tweaks and the piece really could have hit home on just how bad things were in parts of the United Kingdom at the end of July and early August.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Where in the World Is Carmen Santiagova?

In the grand scheme of things, this graphic is not the end of the world. On the other hand, it is probably more than half of the world. In particular, I am talking about this graphic from a BBC article about a recent helicopter crash on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East.

As you can see, Kamchatka extends from the eastern tip of Sibera at the Bering Strait southward towards Hokkaido, the northern-most large island of Japan.

But the thing is…this map is supposed to locate Kamchatka and the crash site of Vachkazhets, but if you look closely at the inset map of the world in the lower left, you can see that the audience is being zoomed into…more than half the world.

I am left to wonder about the efficacy of the map in clarifying the precise location of the crash site. To be fair, Kamchatka is very, very far away from Moscow, probably the city of reference most readers would recognise. But what if instead of a map including India and the Sahara Desert—not at all close to Russia—the map simply cropped in tighter on Russia? Yes, you lose the Kaliningrad Oblast, the little bit of Russia cut off from the rest of the country by the Baltic states, but contextually I think that acceptable.

Or, what if the map took a different approach and omitted Moscow as the point of reference and instead highlighted another global city, like Tokyo, Seoul, or Beijing? After all, those are also all far closer than Moscow.

Ultimately, however, the map irked me because of a glaring error. No, the map does not colour the Crimean Peninsula yellow despite its annexation by Russia. I am perfectly fine with that given the illegality of said annexation, however, after a decade of administration I think there is an argument to be made that Crimea is now administratively more Russian than Ukrainian.

No, all the way in the east, the very edge of the Eurasian continent is grey. But that is also part of Russia. I crudely coloured it—along with part of a larger island—in for you to help you see. There may be some smaller islands that are also grey—most certainly are—but the resolution of the map makes it too difficult to tell for certain.

All in all this just seems like a sloppy locator map. So sloppy I am not sure it even adds value to the article.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics team.

Crossing a State Off the List

Back in autumn 2023 I shared a map with which I keep track of where I’ve visited (and driven/ridden through). In the months since I’ve visited a few new places and decided to update the map.

Most importantly, last autumn I visited Keane, New Hampshire for a day and so crossed the state off the list—not that visiting all 50 states has been or is today a goal of mine. Additionally, I came upon a photograph of me as a young lad in Wilmington, North Carolina. Can I recall being there? No. But I definitely was. So I added that county to the map.

Finally, in terms of new counties visited, I travelled out to Erie, Pennsylvania this past spring to witness the solar eclipse. I had never been to the far opposite corner of the Commonwealth and so coloured that eponymous county purple.

Of course on the day of the eclipse, the sky opened up and rain fell throughout breakfast. Consequently I got into my car and drove west like any proper young man until I found blue skies overhead and Ohio underneath. The eclipse was fantastic and those long-term readers should know that I have a card waiting to go to press, but am waiting for the funding of employment before going into production.

Finally, on my return from Erie, I purchased tickets to enjoy some Red Sox minor league baseball in Reading, Pennsylvania. I opted to enjoy a scenic drive instead of taking the interstates with which I am very familiar. And with that I coloured a number of western Pennsylvania counties in light purple.

Credit for the piece is mine.