The South China Morning Post had a fantastic infographic detailing the hunting of elephants for their ivory. Despite bans to make such hunting illegal, the problem continues and is worsening because of the Asian trade in ivory.
Credit for the piece goes to Adolfo Arranz.
Well, travel for the teams, not you. It’s a big issue in Brazil because unlike the last couple of times, the teams need to travel big distances to reach the cities where they play their matches. Thankfully, to explain just how far some of these distances are for some of these teams, Quartz put together a nice article with quite a few graphics.
This graphic in particular juxtaposes the travels of the US team and the Argentinian team. Who do you think has it easier?
Credit for the piece goes to Jason Karaian and Ritchie King.
From xkcd comes the chart explaining just what of file extension you can trust. Neither the .gif nor the magic .jpeg rate rather highly.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
So Cincinnati was going to have a streetcar. Now it won’t because the recently elected mayor, John Cranley, campaigned on killing the streetcar. I won’t get into the whys and the why nots mostly because I’m not from Cincinnati and others can do it better. Suffice it to say that costs and budget battles played a part. Yesterday the city council opted to pause the project. This will likely suspend federal grant payments, meaning contractors don’t get paid, which means the city faces lawsuits for being in breach of contract, which potentially means the city spends almost as much money cancelling the project as they would completing it.
Ordinarily I would post something from a local newspaper or media outlet covering the story. But today I have the pleasure of sharing some work that my former professor made. His infographic explores the fiscal details of the streetcar project and how much Cincinnati owes if they opt to cancel it in the end.
Credit for the piece goes to Giacomo Ciminello. You can download the original here. And you can visit his site here.
Happy Friday, everybody.
Now go wash your eyes out.
Credit for the piece goes to Jewel Loree.
This article on Yahoo by the AFP has an interesting graphic on the problem facing Australia of illegal arrivals via boat that, in part, probably cost Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party of Australia the recent election.
I like the overall graphic, but I feel that the data labels are unnecessary on the line chart and the bar chart. They distract from the overall shape of the data and are anyways hinted at by the axes labels within the charts themselves. Also, I am a bit unclear as to the meaning of the grey bars in the line chart.
Credit for the piece goes to John Saeki.
The World Series starts tomorrow night and for all but two teams, that means focusing on the upcoming 2014 roster. And rosters are often defined by payroll flexibility. A co-worker of mine forwarded along today’s interactive graphic that looks at team payrolls through stacked bar charts.
The design is certainly a bit clunky with heavy black outlines and garish colours. But the story told is clear, especially if you begin to look at different teams. Which teams have players locked up for the long-term and thereby have little flexibility?
The Red Sox, of course, sent most of that bar from 2011 to the Los Angeles Dodgers near the end of 2012. That allowed them to pick up the free agents like Mike Napoli, Johnny Gomes, Shane Victorino, and Koji Uehara. You know, the guys without whom the Red Sox would not have advanced to the World Series.
Credit for the piece goes to Phil Roth.
In the interests of transparency and full disclosure, for my employer I design interactive web-based applications that display significant amounts of data on various countries and industries—along with other design things. So I am always curious to see how others handle similar types and quantities of data. This interactive application—I hesitate to call something like this an interactive infographic because of its scale and scope—comes from the Global Economic Dynamics project.
I commend the designers for opting not to use a map despite the nature of a dataset that focuses on countries. Especially in this application, where the full pattern of trade or migration would only be visible through multiple clicks to load maps of export/import markets of a particular country.
The user can add multiple countries, switch to a different dataset, change the year of the displayed data, currency, metrics, &c. There is quite a bit going on in this application and the controls are carefully placed in the margins of the piece.
And while I could probably write a lot more about this piece, I will end up the ability to share any insights made while using this application. Because what is the value of a kernel of knowledge if you cannot share it? Consequently, this piece offers a multitude of options. The usual social media options are present. You can also download a .png for use in a presentation, e.g. PowerPoint, or you can download the data. But fascinatingly, the application allows you to embed the piece into your own site.
Unfortunately, I cannot find any specific designers attached to the project. So credit goes to the Global Economic Dynamics project.
Happy Friday, everybody. Today’s post is a graphic from Vanity Fair that looks at the rapper Jay Z. (And for all those wondering, no, I have never intentionally listened to any of his music.) Specifically, this kind-of-stacked-bar-but-more-icon chart indicates how many times he name drops specific luxury brands in his albums.
You can also file this under the graphics to which I cannot relate. Although maybe, just maybe, I once had a pair of Nike trainers. So at least Jay Z and I have that in common.
Credit for the piece goes to Philip Rhie.
NBC News and Esquire magazine published results from their August survey of some 2000+ respondents that attempted to define the New American Center, i.e. the political persuasions of the majority of the country excepting the radical right and the loony left. For the purposes of Coffee Spoons, I am most interested in looking at the data visualisation and the infographics that result.
Both NBC News and Esquire visualised the results. While I could write two long blog posts looking at both of them, for today, it is more important to look more at the fundamental design difference between the two.
NBC News opted for a design direction emphasising data first. Perhaps because NBC is a news platform, their focus was on the clean communication of the data. Looking
On the other hand, Esquire opted for a more sensationalised direction. The same data points used for the screenshot above creates this graphic below. Not only is less data is contained, less context given, less subtlety and nuance captured, it also is just difficult to read. Is the 59% supposed to be the area of the cross filled in? Its length? Why is it three-dimensional? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear? At first glance, I ignore the horizontal wings and focus solely on the vertical length of the main bar.
For a useful representation of data, I think NBC News clearly wins. But that both organisations used the same data to craft their separate results, this story on the New American Center is useful for comparing two different design directions and the results thereof.
No designers are specifically mentioned, at least not that I could find, so credit for each piece goes to its respective owner, i.e. NBC News or Esquire.
