Examining How We Measure Our Lives

Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation

  • A changeup from the political coverage, here we have sportsball! And by sportsball I mean tennis, if you did not get that from today’s post title. Andy Murray won the ATP World Tour finals, and with it won the number one seed in tennis, displacing Novak Djokovic. Nothing super fancy going on here, just a line chart. But, it does do…

    Read on…: Andy Murray

  • So following on from my Wednesday post, let’s take another look at the “problem” of Mexican immigration. Because as these graphics from the Pew Research Center show, it’s not really a problem these days. Instead, immigration is down. Credit for the piece goes to the Pew Research Center graphics department.

    Read on…: Mexican Immigration

  • Happy Friday after the election. Now that we have had our fill on sweets and bitters, we probably need to move towards a more balanced, more moderate diet. A couple of months ago the New York Times put together this scatter plot from the difference between public and nutritionist opinion on whether certain common foods are healthy. I normally do not…

    Read on…: How Healthy Is It?

  • I was not sure if I wanted to file this under either my humourous Friday posts or my regular weekday posts, but I ultimately decided to go with the weekly postings. Why? It’s simply a different way of visualising the election results, by separating the two camps into two separate Americas. One is the geography connected by Trump’s victory, the…

    Read on…: Trumpland vs. Clintonopolis

  • Donald Trump announced how he wants to deport 2–3 million undocumented immigrants that have criminal convictions or that belong to gangs. I read up on the issue at FiveThirtyEight and came across the following graphic from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, when I review the graphic, I found it difficult to understand the FiveThirtyEight article’s point that…

    Read on…: Deportation of Immigrants

  • Boston Beer Company is the parent company of Sam Adams, which is definitely one of those beers I imbibe when I visit Boston. But, as one of the larger craft brewers in the United States, it finds itself under immense competition. This article from Bloomberg examines the situation the brewery finds itself in from a share price, growth, and revenue standpoint.…

    Read on…: Boston Beer Company

  • You clearly didn’t miss this story from two weeks ago, because we all had to change our clocks. But, you might not have thought much about it. Which is fine, because I think there was an election or something a day or two later. Or was I dreaming/nightmaring? Thankfully Andy Woodruff did think about it and he put together a…

    Read on…: Daylight Savings Time

  • Well the election is finally over. And since last week I used my Friday post to talk about something serious, I apologise for backtracking just a wee bit to go back to the election. This summer I had a discussion with one of the designers I worked with at the time, Ciana Frenze. We were sitting out in the Art…

    Read on…: The Sorting Hat

  • A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published a graphic that I thought could use some work. I like line charts, and I think line charts with two or three lines that overlap can be legible. But when I see five in five colours in a small space…well not so much. So I spent 45 minutes attempting to rework…

    Read on…: Detroit’s Housing Market

  • Well this is it. Well at least for you American readers of this blog. It’s Election Day. If you had told me that this is what it would come to almost a year and a half ago, I would have laughed. But it did. And now it comes down to all of us to vote, unless unlike me you live in…

    Read on…: Election Day