BBC – Coffee Spoons

Palestine. The Newest Country in the World?

One of the most debated questions one could ask at pub trivia: How many countries are there in the world?

To start, the question cannot be answered completely. What is a country? What is a state? What is a nation? Define recognition. Whose definition?

When I worked at Euromonitor International I had to edit a map for a Moroccan client because the maps and visualisations I designed showed Western Sahara as a disputed and occupied territory along with places like—surprise, surprise—the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Kashmir, and in later years Abyei. The client was upset because Morocco occupies the majority of Western Sahara, particularly the coast and areas containing the area’s natural resources, and claims it to be an integral part of the kingdom. But the Polisario Front occupies the remainder of Western Sahara and claims the whole territory for its people. Some countries, particularly in Africa, recognise Western Sahara as independent—it belongs as a full member of the African Union. The rest of the world largely refuses to recognise Western Sahara as independent whilst also refusing to recognise Morocco’s occupation. Hence my maps.

You can see what I mean if you look closely at this un-Moroccanised map my team made. I have added some orange boxes to highlight Western Sahara along with the West Bank and Gaza, Abyei, and Kashmir. (Some geographies were simply not covered by the company and remained blank. Here the most notable example is Greenland.)

Do you count Western Sahara as a country?

At your pub trivia this week, will you count Palestine as a country?

This past weekend, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Portugal formally recognised Palestine statehood. They were followed this week by France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, and Malta. (Maybe.) Notably, but not surprisingly, Israel and the United States refuse to follow suit.

My first draft of this post then continued with a history of the Israel–Palestine conflict from the most recent/today’s war to the formation of Israel to the Ottoman Empire and ancient history. But I wanted this post to focus on these graphics posted by the BBC. The first comes from earlier this week, prior to said announcements. The second from later.

I like this graphic. The designer chose to use circles as abstractions of countries rather than a more traditional choropleth map coloured by who recognises whom. In the context of an international conflict over geographic borders and statehood, removing the concept of borders shows a subtle attention to the nuances of the debate.

Critically, the yellow may be a touch light vís-a-vís the grey, but it clearly stands in stark contrast to the purple. I should note I saved this graphic from earlier this week before the official announcements of France et al. Today all that yellow is solidly purple.

As you can see in this second graphic, most of the yellows have become purples. Any of concerns over the lightness of the yellow faded.

Earlier I had noted how Belgium and Andorra were part of President Macron’s announcement, however this graphic shows them still awaiting to announce. I wonder if the discrepancy will be resolved when the representatives of the those countries speak at the United Nations. In essence, they have pledged to announce their recognition, but will do so formally in their address to happen later.

Once again, graphics need not be overly complicated or complex to clearly explain a point to the audience. You can easily see most of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East recognises Palestine. Europe and Oceania remain the outliers at a regional level. But the use of a black stroke to outline the grey dot of the United States makes clear one point. Whilst the use of dots abstracted countries to discrete data points equal in theory, in practice not all dots are equal.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Sudan Side by Side

Conflict—a brutal civil war—continues unabated in Sudan. In the country’s west opposition forces have laid siege to the city of el-Fasher for over a year now. And a recent BBC News article provided readers recent satellite imagery showing the devastation within the city and, most interestingly, one of the most ancient of mankind’s tactics in siege warfare: encircling the town or fortress with a wall. No one gets in. And no one gets out.

The screenshot from the article above is of a village to the west of the city and it reveals the brutality of siege warfare. Paramilitary opposition forces constructed their siege wall through the middle of the village, which the image reveals barely exists any longer.

I love images like this because sometimes complex graphics are not necessary to tell the story. The scale of obliteration is obvious to the audience. And it only requires a moment’s extra thought to realise each building was someone’s home or business.

This second screenshot is of an annotated map from the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University. Coloured lines indicate the siege wall’s size and progress. Unlike the obvious nature of the first set of side-by-side images, here the story requires annotations.

Colours indicate when the paramilitaries built the segment of wall. The village in the satellite photos can be seen on the left of the map with the green dashes appropriately cutting through the text label. There are only four colours relevant to the wall and I perhaps would have explored using a light-to-dark gradient instead of four distinct hues as a gradient implies a progression. The wall began in the north, then went to the west and worked clockwise, i.e. cyan to green to yellow to red. A gradient probably would have been clearer in that regard.

I think the drawback with that particular graphic is the legend is not in the graphic itself. Instead, the BBC had to explain it via the article’s text. The lack of an integrated graphic hurts in cases just like this when, say, a screenshot of the image is used without the accompanying text. Here is an example of how that could work.

Overall I like the graphics. And by like I mean the design of the graphics. I do not like the ongoing civil war. The paramilitary forces have made clear their intention to starve and bombard the city’s population to death. Alas, I doubt we will see anything change anytime soon.

Credit for the original pieces go to the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University and the BBC graphics team.

Credit for the edit is mine.

It’s Raining Drones

Last Friday the BBC published an article about the US’ resumption of supplying military assistance to Ukraine in its defence of Russia’s invasion. But in that article, the author referenced the increased intensity of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine over that week.

To show the intensity, the BBC included this graphic, which incorporates a heat map into a traditional calendar design. A thin white line separates each day and a thicker stroke separates the months.

A calendar heat map showing the intensity of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine.

The legend incorporates its own visualisation component, wherein the scale of the difference in the bin buckets shows. After all, there is a significant difference between a bucket of 25 strikes, say between 25 and 50, versus 250 strikes, say between 250 and 500.

I really liked this graphic a lot. It very clearly shows that increasing intensity and annotations point out the worst days for Ukraine were indeed in that last week. And in attention to detail, note how the arrows have a thin white stroke outlining them, helping create visual separation between the arrows and the calendar heatmap below.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

A Warming Climate Floods All Rivers

Last weekend, the United States’ 4th of July holiday weekend, the remnants of a tropical system inundated a central Texas river valley with months’ worth of rain in just a few short hours. The result? The tragic loss of over 100 lives (and authorities are still searching for missing people).

Debate rages about why the casualties ranked so high—the gutting of the National Weather Service by the administration shines brightly—but the natural causes of the disaster are easier to identify. And the BBC did a great job covering those in a lengthy article with a number of helpful graphics.

I will start with this precipitation map, created with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data.

A map of precipitation over central Texas.

I remain less than fully enthusiastic about continual gradients for map colouration schemes, however the extreme volume of rainfall during the weather event makes the location of the flooding obvious to all. Nonetheless the designers annotated the map, pointing out river, the camp at the centre of the tragedy and the county wherein most of the deaths occurred.

In short, more than 12 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours. The article also uses a time lapse video to show the river’s flash flooding when it rose a number of feet in less than half an hour.

The article uses the captivating footage of the flash flooding as the lead graphic component. And I get it. The footage is shocking. And you want to get those sweet, sweet engagement clicks and views. But from the standpoint of the overall narrative structure of the piece, I wonder if starting with the result works best.

Rather, the extreme rainfall and geographic features of the river valley contributed at the most fundamental level and showcasing that information and data, such as in the above map, would be a better place to start. The endpoint or culmination of the contributing factors is the flash flooding and the annotated photo of flood water heights inside the cabins of the camp.

Overall I enjoyed the piece tremendously and walked away better informed. I had visited an area 80 miles east of the floods several years ago for a wedding. Coincidentally on the 4th I remarked to a different friend from the area now living in Philadelphia about the flatness and barrenness of the landscape between Austin and San Antonio. I had no idea that just to the west rivers cut through the elevated terrain that would together cause over a hundred deaths a few hours later.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC, but the article listed a healthy number of contributors whom I shall paste here: Writing by Gary O’Donoghue in Kerr County, Texas, Matt Taylor of BBC Weather and Malu Cursino. Edited by Tom Geoghegan. Images: Reuters/Evan Garcia, Brandon Bell, Dustin Safranek/EPA/Shutterstock, Camp Mystic, Jim Vondruska, Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP and Getty.

Imports, Tariffs, and Taxes, Oh My!

Apologies, all, for the lengthy delay in posting. I decided to take some time away from work-related things for a few months around the holidays and try to enjoy, well, the holidays. Moving forward, I intend to at least start posting about once per week. After all, the state of information design these days provides me a lot of potential critiques.

Let us start with the news du jour , the application of tariffs on China and the delayed imposition on both Canada and Mexico. Firstly, let us be very clear what a tariff is. A tariff is a tax paid by importers or consumers on goods sourced from outside the country. In this case, we are talking about Canadian, Mexican, and Chinese imports and the United States slapping tariffs on goods from those countries. Foreign governments do not pay money to the United States, neither Canada, nor Mexico, nor China will pay money to the United States.

You will.

You should expect your shopping costs to increase, whether that is on the price of gasoline (imported from Canada), fast fashion apparel (from China), or avocados (from Mexico). On the more durable goods side, homes are built with Canadian lumber and your automobiles with parts sourced from across North America—the reason why we negotiated NAFTA back in the 1990s.

Now that we have established what tariffs are, why is the Trump administration imposing them? Ostensibly because border security and fentanyl. What those two issues have to do with trade policy and economics…I have no idea. But a few news outlets created graphics showing US imports from our top-five trading partners.

First I saw this graphic from the New York Times. It is a variation of a streamgraph and it needs some work.

A streamgraph type chart from the *New York Times*

To start, at any point along the timeline, can you roughly get a sense of what the value for any country is? No. Because there is no y-axis to provide a sense of scale. Perhaps these are the top import sources and these are their share of the total imports? Read the fine print and…no. These are the countries with a minimum of 2% share in 2024, which is approximately 75% of US imports.

This graphic fails at clearly communicating the share of imports. You need to somehow extrapolate from the y-height in 2024 given the three direct labels for Canada, Mexico, and China what the values are at any other point in time or for any other country.

Nevertheless, the chart does a few things nicely. It does highlight the three countries of importance to the story, using colours instead of greys. That focuses your attention on the story, whilst leaving other countries of importance still available for your review. Secondly, the nature of this chart ranks the greatest share as opposed to a straight stacked area chart.

Overall, for me the chart fails on a number of fronts. You could argue it looks pretty, though.

The aforementioned stacked area charts—also not a favourite of mine for this sort of comparison—forces the designer to choose a starting country in this case and then stack other countries atop it.

What this chart does really well, especially well compared to the previous New York Times example is provide content for all countries across all time periods by the inclusion of the y-axis. Like the Times graphic it focuses attention on Canada, Mexico, and China with colour and uses grey to de-emphasise the other countries. You can see here how the Times’ decision to exclude all countries below 2% can skew the visual impact of the chart, though here all countries below Japan (everything but the top-five) are grouped as other.

Personally, the inclusion of the specific data labels for Canada, Mexico, and China distract from the visualisation and are redundant. The y-axis provides the necessary framework to visually estimate the share. If the reader needs a value to the precision level of tenths, a table may be a better option.

I could not find one of the charts I thought I had bookmarked and so in an image search I found a chart from one of my former employers on the same topic (though it uses value instead of share) and it is worth a quick critique.

A stacked area chart from Euromonitor International

Towards the end of my time there, I was creating templates for more wide-screen content. My fear from an information design and data visualisation standpoint, however, was the increased stretch in simple, low data-intensity graphics. This chart incorporates just 42 data points and yet it stretches across 1200 pixels on my screen with a height of 500.

Compare that to the previous BBC graphic, which is also 1200 pixels, but has a greater height of 825 pixels. Those two dimensions give ratios of 2.4 for Euromonitor International and 1.455 for the BBC. Neither is the naturally aesthetically pleasing golden ratio of 1.618, but at least the BBC version is close to Tufte’s recommended 1.5–1.6. The idea behind this is that the greater the ratio, the softer the slope of the line. This can make it more difficult to compare lines. A steeper slope can emphasise changes over time, especially in a line chart. You can roughly compare this by looking at the last few years of the longer time span in the BBC graphic to the entirety of this graphic. You can more easily see the change in the y-axis because you have more pixels in which to show the change.

Finally we get to another New York Times graphic. This one, however, is a more traditional line chart.

And for my money, this is the best. The data is presented most clearly and the chart is the most legible and digestible. The colours clearly focus your attention on Canada, Mexico, and China. The use of lines instead of stacked area allow the top importer to “rise” to the top. You can track the rapid rise of Chinese imports from the late 1990s through to the first Trump administration and the imposition of tariffs in 2018—note the significant drop in the line. In fact you can see the impact in Mexico becoming the United States’ top trading partner in recent years.

Over the years, if I had a dollar for every time I was told someone wanted a graphic made “sexier” or with more “sizzle” or made “flashier”, I would have…a bigger bank account. The issue is that “cooler” graphics do not always lead to clearer graphics. Graphics that communicate the data better. And the guiding principle of information design and data visualisation should be to make your graphics clear rather than cool.

Credit for the New York Times streamgraph goes to Karl Russell.

Credit for the BBC graphic goes to the BBC graphics department.

Credit for the Euromonitor International graphic goes to Justinas Liuima.

Credit for the New York Times line chart goes to the New York Times.

Labelling Line Charts

Today I have a little post about something I noticed over the weekend: labelling line charts.

It begins with a BBC article I read about the ongoing return to office mandates some companies have been rolling out over the last few years. When I look for work these days, one important factor is the office work situation and so seeing an article about the tension in that issue, I had to read it.

The article includes this graphic of Office of National Statistics (ONS) data and BBC analysis.

Overall, the chart does a few things I like, most notably including the demarcation for the methodology change. The red–green here also works. Additionally the thesis expressed by the title, “Hybrid has overtaken WFH”, clearly evidences itself by the green line crossing the blue. (I would quibble and perhaps change the hybrid line to red as it is visually more impactful.)

I also like on the y-axis how we do not have a line connecting all the intervals. Such lines are often unnecessary and can often add visual clutter, see yesterday’s post for something similar. I quibble here with dropping the % symbol for the zero-line. Since the rest of the graphic uses it, I would have put the baseline as 0%. And that baseline is indeed represented by a darker, black line instead of the grey used for the other intervals.

Then we get to the labels on the right of the graphic. Firstly, I do not subscribe to the view charts and graphs need to label individual datapoints. If the designer created the chart correctly, the graph should be legible. Furthermore, charts show relationships, if one needs a specific value, I would opt for a table or a factette instead. These are not the most egregious labels, mind you, but here they label the datapoint, but not the line. Instead, for the line the reader needs to go back to the chart’s data definition and retrieve the information associated with the colour.

Now compare that to a chart representing Major League Baseball’s playoff odds from Fangraphs.

Here too we have mostly good things going on, but I want to highlight the labelling at the right. This chart also includes the precise value, which is fine, but here we also have the actual label for the lines. The user does not need to leave the experience of the chart to find the relevant information, although a secondary/redundant display or legend can be found at the bottom of the chart.

If you can take the time to label the end value, you may as well label the series.

Credit for the BBC graphic goes to the BBC’s graphics department.

Credit for the Fangraphs piece goes to Fangraphs’ design team.

Life Aboard the International Space Station

This weekend I read a neat little article from the BBC about astronauts’ lives aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This comes on the heels of two NASA astronauts being left on the station due to some uncertainty about their Boeing spacecraft’s safety. The article featured a number of annotated photographs and illustrations, but this was my favourite.

The designers do a nice job of highlighting the particular components/sections of the station. This was my favourite as they darkened the non-relevant sections—looking at you solar panels.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

I Didn’t Predict a Riot

Yesterday I wrote about a BBC graphics locator map that was perhaps not as helpful as possible. Well today I want to talk about another BBC map, though not in as critical a fashion.

I landed upon this map whilst reading a series of updates about last month’s anti-immigrant riots throughout the United Kingdom—principally England.

The graphic uses small multiples of a cropping of the United Kingdom, excluding most of Northern Ireland and a good bit of Scotland. Red dots highlight where, on a particular date, far-right riots erupted. As the reader moves further into time, the red dots become a dark grey.

In general, I think this graphic works really well. The designer does not label every city and town as it’s not necessary so long as you hit the big and most notable ones. Nonetheless I have two peccadilloes with the graphic.

First, and the minor of the two, is the grey dots could perhaps be toned down a wee bit. Or fade as tints as they recede into the past.

Secondly, the note at the bottom of the graphic indicates “[t]here were no recorded incidents of unrest on Thursday 1 August”. Correspondingly, the graphic lacks a map for 1 August. If I had designed the graphic, I would have included a blank map for that date, because its emptiness could tell part of the story as sometimes nothing is something.

A blank map on Thursday could show that a brief flare up after the incident in Southport had, at best, burned out or, at worst, cooled to a simmer. Something then happened likely Friday night—after a day with only two reported incidents—or Saturday morning, which prompted a weekend of riots and destruction across the United Kingdom.

What could that be? Social media. Surprise, surprise. The BBC had a good article about the potential inflammatory aspect of social media posts on the reignition of the hatred the weekend of 3–4 August. Imagine a blank map for 1 August and a caption that notes a series of posts on, say, 2 or 3 August, followed by the red dots all across northern England.

As I said at the outset, however, I like the piece overall. Just a few small tweaks and the piece really could have hit home on just how bad things were in parts of the United Kingdom at the end of July and early August.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Where in the World Is Carmen Santiagova?

In the grand scheme of things, this graphic is not the end of the world. On the other hand, it is probably more than half of the world. In particular, I am talking about this graphic from a BBC article about a recent helicopter crash on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East.

As you can see, Kamchatka extends from the eastern tip of Sibera at the Bering Strait southward towards Hokkaido, the northern-most large island of Japan.

But the thing is…this map is supposed to locate Kamchatka and the crash site of Vachkazhets, but if you look closely at the inset map of the world in the lower left, you can see that the audience is being zoomed into…more than half the world.

I am left to wonder about the efficacy of the map in clarifying the precise location of the crash site. To be fair, Kamchatka is very, very far away from Moscow, probably the city of reference most readers would recognise. But what if instead of a map including India and the Sahara Desert—not at all close to Russia—the map simply cropped in tighter on Russia? Yes, you lose the Kaliningrad Oblast, the little bit of Russia cut off from the rest of the country by the Baltic states, but contextually I think that acceptable.

Or, what if the map took a different approach and omitted Moscow as the point of reference and instead highlighted another global city, like Tokyo, Seoul, or Beijing? After all, those are also all far closer than Moscow.

Ultimately, however, the map irked me because of a glaring error. No, the map does not colour the Crimean Peninsula yellow despite its annexation by Russia. I am perfectly fine with that given the illegality of said annexation, however, after a decade of administration I think there is an argument to be made that Crimea is now administratively more Russian than Ukrainian.

No, all the way in the east, the very edge of the Eurasian continent is grey. But that is also part of Russia. I crudely coloured it—along with part of a larger island—in for you to help you see. There may be some smaller islands that are also grey—most certainly are—but the resolution of the map makes it too difficult to tell for certain.

All in all this just seems like a sloppy locator map. So sloppy I am not sure it even adds value to the article.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics team.

Cavalcante Captured

Well, I’ve had to update this since I first wrote, but had not yet published, this article. Because this morning police captured Danelo Cavalcante, the murderer on the lam after escaping from Chester County Prison, with details to follow later today.

This story fascinates me because it understandably made headlines in Philadelphia, from which the prison is only perhaps 30–40 miles, but the national and even international coverage astonished me. Maybe not the initial article, but the days-long coverage certainly seemed excessive when we had much larger problems or notable events occurring throughout the world.

That brings me to this quick comparison of these two maps. The first is from the local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. It is a screenshot in two parts, the first the actual map and the second the accompanying timeline.

Then we have the BBC and their map of the story:

Both maps use light greys and neutral colours to ground the reader’s experience, his or her welcome to the world of southeastern Pennsylvania. The Inquirer uses a beige and a white focus for Chester County and the BBC omits county distinctions and uses white for rural and grey for built-up areas around Philadelphia.

Both maps use red numbers in their timeline sections to sequence the events, though the Inquirer’s is more extensive in its details and links the red events to red map markers.

The Inquirer leans heavily on local roads and highways with lines of varying width in white with thin outlines. Whereas the BBC marks only significant roads as thin blue lines.

The Inquirer’s map adds a lot of geographical context, especially for an audience fastidiously following the situation. And the following makes sense given all the local closures and anxiety—though I’m of the opinion a significant bit of those closures and anxiety were unwarranted. But for a reader in London, Toronto, or Melbourne, does anyone really need to see Boot Road? Strasburg Road? Even Route 30? Or the Route 30 Bypass (at Route 100, hi, Mum)? Not really, and so the omission of many of the local roads makes sense.

I would keep the roads relevant to the story of the search or the capture, for example Routes 23 and 1, and places relevant, for example Longwood Gardens and South Coventry. Here the BBC perhaps goes too far in omitting any place labels aside from Philadelphia, which is itself borderline out of place.

What I like about the BBC’s map, however, is the use of the white vs. grey to denote rural vs. built-up areas, a contextual element the Inquirer lacks. Over the last two weeks I have heard from city folks here in Philadelphia, why can’t the cops capture Cavalcante in Chester County? Well, if you’ve ever driven around the area where he initially roamed, it’s an area replete with wooded hills and creeks and lots of not-so-dense rich people homes. We don’t yet know where he was finally captured, but in Phoenixville he was spotted on camera because it’s an actual borough (I’m pretty certain it’s incorporated) with a walkable downtown. It’s dense with people. And not surprisingly the number of spottings increased as he moved into a denser area.

The Inquirer’s map, however, doesn’t really capture that. It’s just some lines moving around a map with some labels. The BBC’s map, though imperfect because the giant red box obscures a lot of the initial search area, at least shows us how Cavalcante evaded capture in a white thus rural, less-dense area before being seen in a grey thus built-up dense area.

All-in-all, both are good enough. But I wish somebody had managed to combine both into one. Less road map than the Inquirer’s, but more context and grounding than the BBC.

Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to John Duchneskie.

Credit for the BBC piece goes to the BBC graphics department.