I am a graphic designer who focuses on information design. Most recently I worked for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and prior to that I was Head of Design at Euromonitor International with my design team split between Chicago and London.
Last week my pub trivia team was debating whether our high score, although only good for second place—we lost by one point—was the highest. So this past weekend I scoured my sketchbooks for the last year and a half and reviewed our scores.
Alas, the earliest appearances were tally-free. And I did not record them consistently until this past autumn, but I had developed a decent system by last summer for the sake of comparing weeks.
Over the summer (not entirely captured) and autumn, we had a string of first-place finishes. Then we cratered towards the new year. And while we have strung together a couple of second-place finishes, we haven’t finished in first since last autumn.
We’ve been on a steady climb up since the new year…
Yesterday was murders in London and New York. Today, we have a nice article from FiveThirtyEight about deaths more broadly in America. If you recall, my point yesterday was that not all graphics need to be full column width. And this article takes that approach—some graphics are full width whereas others are not.
This screenshot shows a nice line chart that, while the graphic sits in the full column, the actual chart is only about half the width of the graphic. I think the only thing that does not sit well with me is the alignment of the chart below the header. I probably would align the two as it creates an odd spacing to the left of the chart. But I applaud the restraint from making the line charts full width, as it would mask the vertical change in the data set.
The screenshot is of the graphic’s full width, note the lines only go a little over half the width.
Meanwhile, the article’s maps all sit in the full column. But my favourite graphic of the whole set sits at the very end of the piece. It examines respiratory deaths in a tabular format. But it makes a fantastic use of sparklines to show the trend leading towards the final number in the row.
Loving the sparklines…
Credit for the piece goes to Ella Koeze and Anna Maria Barry-Jester.
In murders. Not the best of news, no. But this past March London saw more murders than New York. But as I was reading the BBC article this weekend, I wondered why the graphic they chose to use received as much prominence in the article as it did.
London moves ahead of New York
The chart as you can see occupied a full column width. But keep in mind, we are looking at a total of six datapoints: the murders for two cities in three months. While the story and data is significant, does the display of the data need to be?
My version
The important point in the story is that in the past three months, London has surpassed New York in the number of murders. But the graphic supporting those six data points should not be overwhelming the significance of the text explaining the trend. After all, the data consists of only three points for two cities. If the data is displayed on an extended horizontal axis, it flattens the change and minimises the increase. To counteract that, the y axis should be increased, but then the amount of screen real estate being devoted to six data points is enormous. The better approach is to use a smaller graphic that displays the data in a better proportion, but also in a proportion that does not blow out the text of the story. The graphic to the right (and maybe above this blurb of text) shows how that can be done in a smaller space.
Credit for the original goes to the BBC graphics department.
I work with economists. And so I get to see working papers and other technical papers on a rather frequent basis. But I still have no way of verifying this premise. Though I most certainly believe in that dip…
I mean all things go downhill when PowerPoint is involved…I’m not bitter, I swear.
The 2018 season starts today with I think every team playing—the Red Sox open down in St. Petersburg against the Rays. So today’s post is on the light side as I could not find the awesomest baseball graphic. But FiveThirtyEight did at least preview the season and ran some projections. Naturally, I disagree with their projections. But I think finally this year the Yankees will be more of a threat to the Red Sox than they have been in years. The rivalry is back. (Though it never really went away in my mind.)
Switch numbers one and two and I think this might be okay…
The above is the screenshot for the American League East, because Boston. But, the rest of the AL is on that page as well. For those of you from my more National League-following cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, FiveThirtyEight also previewed the NL divisions here.
Last week I met a friend for drinks and part of our conversation was about how on a trip to east Asia, he flew from New York and then over the North Pole. The North Pole! I then explained it was cool, but not unique. Instead aircraft typically fly between destinations via great circles. Basically, the shortest distance between two points on the Earth is a straight line, but remember the Earth is not exactly flat. Its spherical nature means that the shortest distance sometimes is what you would see as a curve on a flat map. And sometimes, those curves are shortest when plotted over the North Pole, because unlike a flat map, the east and west ends really do connect.
Lo and behold, yesterday the Economist published a piece about a new non-stop flight between London and Perth, on Australia’s southwest coast. The graphic shows the ten longest commercial flight paths. And what do you know, one of the longest is a soon-to-be flight from New York to Singapore that flies near the North Pole.
Great circles are cool.
Of course the key to this type of diagram is the type of projection. Instead of using the Mercator-like map made popular by direction-focused maps like those of Google, here we see an orthographic presentation. It presents the Earth as if we were to see it from space, allowing us to see the fullness of the flight paths. Tellingly, those that appear to cross the middle of the map are shown as straight lines (Atlanta to Johannesburg), but those nearer the edges show the curvature of the great circles (Houston to Sydney).
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
Earlier this March the Washington Post published a piece looking at the twenty finalist contenders for the second Amazon headquarters. Specifically it explored how the cities rank in metrics that speak to a city’s technology and innovation economy.
That in and of itself, while incredibly fascinating, is not noteworthy in and of itself. Though I will say the article’s online title is neatly presented, split half-and-half with the vertical graphic showing the cities ranked.
I really like how this title space received a special design.
But the point that was really neat was the interactivity that followed. Here you can see a dropdown from which the user selects a city of interest—surprise, surprise we are looking at Philadelphia. From that point on, the piece keeps the selected city highlighted in every graphic that follows.
Looking at Philly
Again, that is nothing truly surprising, but it is neat to see. What would have taken it to the next step is if each of those associated paragraphs were tailored to the specific city. Instead, they appear to be general paragraphs.
But overall, it does a really nice job of comparing the twenty cities—it’s actually fewer because both Washington and New York have multiple sites per metro area—across the different metrics.
The only part that left me scratching my head a bit was the colour choice. I am not certain that it needs the blue-green to yellow-green palette. Those colours seem defined by a city’s placement on the overall list and I am not convinced that the piece would not have still worked if they had been only a single colour, using another colour to define the selected city.
Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron and Jonathan O’Connell.
Let’s start this week with a quick hit on popularity and politics. It ties in nicely with the fact that my local congressman, a Republican, announced on Sunday he would not be seeking re-election in a very competitive district.
This piece in particular comes from the Economist and in terms of form, it is fairly simple. A scatter plot tackling the popularity of groups of people and specific politicians divided by whether the respondent is Republican or Democratic.
A nation divided…
The reason I really like this scatter plot are the inclusion of the keys at the four corners. The split between Republicans and Democrats is fairly obvious and nicely coloured. But the little keys really help to clear up any confusion about what is happening as groups of people fall closer to one corner or another. The keys were a small and subtle, but very important design decision.
But what does it all mean? Well, as the headline says, we both rate favourably nurses and working people. Less so Congress and Mitch McConnell.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s graphics team.
I know I’ve looked at the Times a few times this week, but before we get too far into the next week, I did want to show what they printed on Saturday.
It is not too often we get treated to data on the front page or even the section pages. But last Saturday we got just that in the Business Section. Two very large and prominent charts looked at federal government borrowing and the federal deficit. Both are set to grow in the future, largely due to the recently enacted tax cuts.
That’s about half the page on those two charts.
The great thing about the graphic is just how in-the-face it puts the data. Do two charts with 14 data points (28 total) need to occupy half the page? No. But there is something about the brashness of the piece that I just love.
And then it continues and the rest of the article points, at more normal sizes, to treasury bill yields and car loan rates. The inside is what you would expect and does it well in single colour.
