Well, I mean trying to is this piece by the Washington Post. Included are several diagrams at key phases of the conflict that attempt to show how the various parties interacted with each other.
Ultimately the key takeaway is that Syria is a mess and it is not getting any better. So let’s just add some more lines in there, am I right?
Credit for the piece goes to Denise Lu and Gene Thorp.
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 showcases the tool’s split of the time series into short-, medium-, and long-term impacts and how those work in the best and worst case scenarios. But it then allows the user to jump right on in and create their own scenarios.
Credit for the piece goes to John Burn-Murdoch and Pilita Clark.
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 clearer. Or, a lot clearer. Simple little tweaks can make all the difference in data clarity. Now you can visually see the scale of difference in the votes. You also don’t need to refer to a legend off to the side with tints of the same colour.
Credit for the original piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
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 speaker had prior to taking the role.
By putting the dots around a circle, the Post has created an interesting graphic. But the format makes it difficult to compare individuals who are not close together.
Credit for the piece goes to Philip Bump.
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.
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, I find the pattern fill interesting and not something I have seen done before for a political map.
But I really like what the CBC did. They built an interactive application to cover the evening’s results as they arrived. This screenshot is for the riding in Fredericton, where my ancestors lived in the 19th century. (I had to have a connection to the ridings somehow.) In particular, I liked the ability to star ridings of interest and have them immediately retrievable. The CBC complemented that with a list of ridings to watch. It was a great resource for the evening.
But then they also covered the results with an article with interactive graphics. This is more your standard fare with choropleths, bar charts, and line charts. But they flow through the article quite sensibly. Overall, a solid results piece.
Credit for the National Post piece goes to the National Post graphics department.
Credit for the CBC piece goes to the the CBC graphics department.
Last month we looked at the Washington Post’s coverage of the second Republican Debate. For those unaware, the first Democratic Debate was held last night. And so it is only fair for us to look at the Post’s coverage of that event.
Credit for the piece goes to Samuel Granados, Richard Johnson, Denise Lu, Ted Mellnik, and Kevin Schaul.
Migrants and refugees continue to reach Europe. But some of those people can be sent back, depending upon their country of origin. The tricky part is that there is no common set of countries as this graphic from the Economist shows.
In terms of design, we see nothing too elaborate here. This is really just a table where checks, half-checks, and exes would have sufficed. But, sometimes, a table is really all you need to convey the important data.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s Data Team.
From time to time in my job I hear the desire or want for more different types of charts. But in this piece by Nick Brown over on Medium, we can see that there are really only a few key forms and some are already terrible—here’s looking at you, pie charts. How new are some of these forms? Turns out most are not that new—or very new depending on your history/timeline perspective. Brown illustrated that timeline by hand.
Worth the read is his thoughts on what is new for data visualisation and what might be next. No spoilers.
Credit for the piece goes to Nick Brown.
I attended a dinner on Monday where the topic of Millennials arose. While most of the evening is not germane to this post, I did recall Wait But Why’s piece on why Millennials are unhappy on the way back to my flat. So here you go, a look at the Millennials and why we are unhappy. Bonus: we have unicorns and rainbows.
Credit for the piece goes to Tim Urban.
