Coffee Spoons – Page 63 – Examining How We Measure Our Lives

Ohio 12th Results

Last week parts of Ohio voted for a special election in the 12th Congressional District. Historically it has been a solidly Republican district by margins in the double digits. However, last week Republicans barely managed to hold the seat by, at the latest count I saw, less than one percentage point. Why? Well, it turns out that Republican support is bleeding away from one of the traditional strongholds: suburban counties.

I saw this data set late last week on Politico and I knew instinctively that it needed to be presented in another form than a table. Consequently I sketched out how it could work as small multiples of area charts to highlight just how Republican the district is. This is the digitisation of that take. Unfortunately my original sketch also featured a map of the district to show how this falls to the north and east of the city of Columbus. But I did not have time for that. Instead, I sketched up something else, but I need time to work on that. So for now, this concept will have to suffice.

That flip to the Democrats in Franklin County could be a problem come November

Credit for the piece is mine.

Radiohead in Philadelphia

A week and a half ago my favourite band, Radiohead, played two shows in Philadelphia to close out their 2018 North America tour. I got to see the final of the two shows. And I decided to make this little piece over the weekend. Because it was totally fantastic.

The data shows that the band played a good mix of songs from across their discography. Admittedly they played nothing from Pablo Honey, but with the exception of Creep and Anyone Can Play Guitar along with some of the era’s b-sides, I really do not listen to that album all that often. They also skipped over Amnesiac, but did play five songs from my favourite album, Kid A, so, yeah, again, totally fantastic. Especially those final three songs to close the main setlist. Just brilliant.

Credit for this work is mine.

Joblessness in the Developed World

We have been looking at tariffs a little bit this week, but unfortunately one of the side effects of tariffs is job losses. And of course when it comes to people losing jobs, not all countries in the developed world handle them the same. Last month the Washington Post published an article examining how those countries compare in a number of related metrics such as unemployment compensation, notice for termination, and income inequality.

Not all countries give people the short stick.

It uses a series of bar charts to show the dataset and reveal how the United States fares poorly compared to its peers. The chart above looks at the earning needed for termination from employment and the differences are stark. The outlined bar chart shows longer tenured employees and the full bars as coloured. Of course this makes it look like a stacked bar chart or filled bar chart. Instead I wonder if a dot plot would be clearer. It would eliminate the confusion in determining what if any share of the empty bar is held by the full bar.

The US offers shockingly little assistance to people

The chart for unemployment insurance versus assistance is a bit better. Here the bar represents insurance and the lines assistance. I like how the lines continue off beyond the margins to indicate an unlimited timeframe for assistance. However, for those countries where assistance is short-lived, the bars versus lines again begin to look like an instance of a share of a total, which they are not.

My New Toast

I am a millennial. That broadly means I am destroying and/or ruining everything. It also means I am obsessed with things like avocado toast. It also means I am not buying a house. Thankfully the Economist is on top of my next fad: indoor houseplants.

Your author will admit to having a few: a hanging plant, an Easter lily, an aloe plant and its children, and a dwarf conifer. Just don’t ask me how they’re doing. (Hint: not well.) Turns out I am not a plant person.

In terms of the graphic, though, what we have is a straight up set of small multiples of line charts. The seasonality mentioned in the article text appears quite clearly in a number of plants.

But is Swiss Cheese really a plant?

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Apple Hits One Trillion

Last Tuesday we looked at a print piece from the New York Times detailing the share price plunge of Facebook after the company revealed how recent scandals and negative news impacted its financials. Well, today we have a piece from last week that shows how large Apple is after it hit a market capitalisation of one trillion US dollars.

The piece itself is not big on the data visualisation, but it functions much like the Facebook piece, as a blend of editorial design and data visualisation. The graphic falls entirely above the fold and combines a factette and maybe we could classify it as a deconstructed tree map. It uses squares where, presumably, the area equates to the company’s value. And the sum total of those squares equals that of one trillion dollars, or the value of Apple.

In terms of design it does it well. The factette is large enough to just about stretch across the width of the page and so matches the graphic below it in its array of colours. Why the colours? I believe these are purely aesthetic. After all, it is unclear to me just what Ford, Hasbro, and General Mills all have in common. In a more straight data visualisation piece, we might see colour used to classify companies by industry, by growth in share price or market share. Here, however, colour functions in the editorial space to grab the reader’s attention.

The design also makes use of white space surrounding the text, much like the Facebook piece last week, to quiet the overall space above the fold and focus the reader’s attention on the story. Note that the usual layout of stories on the page continues, but only after the fold.

When we keep in mind the function of the piece, i.e. it is not a straight-up-explore-the-data type of piece, we can appreciate how well it functions. All in all this was a really nice treat last Friday morning.

Credit for the piece goes to Karl Russell and Jon Huang.

Always Be Creating

I like to think that becoming a good designer requires lots of work. And that means different types of work. Work pushing you to learn new skills. So this graphic by Jessica Hagy over on Indexed makes perfect sense. How good you at something ties into how much you work at it.

Got to get through the x to get to the y

I pair the concept with Glenngarry Glen Ross and Alec Baldwin’s “Always be closing” speech. For your Friday entertainment, this is my more favourite rendition of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_vSirIJEsY&t=7s

Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

Fundraising for the Midterms

We are now less than 100 days away—95 to be exact—from the 2018 midterm elections here in the United States. As we get closer and closer we not only get more information from polls, but also campaign finance reports. Those can sometimes serve as a proxy for support as lots of grassroots support can dump lots of cash in a candidate’s war chest. Wheras a candidate who drums up little support might find him or herself with scant funds to fight the campaign.

So what does that funding tell us right now? Well last week Politico posted an article looking at that data. They broke the dataset into chunks by the likelihood of the results. This screenshot is of Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District.

What's going on north of Philly — What’s going on north of Philly

Each district is represented by a dot plot, with the total money raised by each candidate plotted, the distance in grey being the amount by which the Democrat outraised the Republican.

This is a nice piece as the hover state provides a nice grey bar behind the district to focus the user’s attention. Then for the secondary level of information in terms of cash on hand for the Democrats, i.e. who has cash now, we get the dot filled in versus the open state for simply money raised. Then of course the hover state reveals the actual numbers for the two candidates along with the difference between the two.

The funny thing with this particular district, the Pennsylvania 1st, is that Wallace is not necessarily raising a lot of money. He is a self-funding millionaire. He also is not the most electable Democrat in a competitive seat. It will be fascinating to watch how this particular district performs over the next few months, but most importantly in November.

Credit for the piece goes to Sarah Frostenson.

Development Languages

Last week the Economist published an article sort of about my industry. Now I am a designer and more familiar with the front-end design and some HTML and CSS, but a lot of the things I have designed over the last few years have needed some serious developers with some serious skills. And those guys were the ones who would truly understand this graphic, which looks at the popularity of Python relative to other languages like C++, Java, Javascript, .NET, &c.

Python has certainly climbed in importance

I really like what the designers did here. First and foremost the key chart is a ranking chart showing the popularity of languages since 1988—Java and C have consistently been at the top. But other languages no longer relevant are not even shown. (Where are you, Actionscript?) Those that are both relevant and also mentioned are colour coded within the set.

But the truly nice thing is being able to use the empty space of the lower-left area of the chart to add some context. It shows the growth in Google searches since 2010 in searches for Python.

Bonus note, look at that rise in R since 2008.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Facebook’s Share Price Plunge

Last Thursday, Facebook’s share price plunged on the news of some not so great numbers from the company on its quarterly earnings report. The data and number itself is not terribly surprising—it is a line chart. But what I loved is how the New York Times handled this on the front of the Business section on Friday morning.

I found the layout of the page and that article striking. In particular, each day of the share price is almost self-contained in that the axis lines start and stop for each day. I question the thickness of the stroke as something a little thinner might have been a bit clearer on the data. However, it might also have not been strong enough to carry the attention at the top of the page. As it is, that attention is needed to draw the reader down the page and then down across the fold.

Additionally, the designers were sensitive to the need to draw that attention down the page. In order to do that they kept the white space around the graphic and kept the text to two small blocks before moving on to the interior of the section.

Credit for the story goes to Matthew Philips. Although I’m pretty sure the page layout goes to somebody else.

Switching Sides

For those of you not baseball fans, Tuesday is Major League Baseball’s trading deadline. By that evening, trades of players between teams are sort of over for the year. (Yes, I understand this is the non-waiver deadline and the waiver deadline is at the end of August, but that is complicated to explain.) And so as the end of July approaches, trades can reach a frenetic pace as teams try and fill the holes in their rosters before the playoffs begin in October.

Thankfully the folks over at Cut 4 put together a flow chart to help teams figure out how to fill those needs.

A lot of these have paths have already been closed.

Of course by this point, a number of these players have already switched sides. In terms of design, this is more like a Friday post. Just enjoy it.

Credit for the piece goes to Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman.