Long before I worked as a designer, I was a busboy. After that I was a dishwasher. After that I was a barista. Then I became a designer. This graphic from Indexed resonated with me, because, yeah, at a more basic level, don’t fuck with your servers.
Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.
This piece was published Monday, so it’s one round out of date, but it still holds true. It looks at the betting odds of each of the candidates looking to enter No. 10 Downing Street. And yeah, it’s going to be Boris.
The thing that strikes me as odd about this piece however, is note the size of the circles. Why are they larger for Boris Johnson and Rory Stewart? It cannot be proportional to their odds of victory or else Boris’ head would be…even bigger. Is that even possible? Maybe it relates to their predicted placement of first and second, the two of which go to the broader Tory party for a vote. It’s really unclear and deserves some explanation.
The graphic also includes a standard line chart. It falls down because of spaghettification in that all those also rans have about the same odds, i.e. slim, to beat Boris.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to follow is who will be the other person on the ballot. But then who remembers Andrea Leadsom was the runner up to Theresa May?
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
Today is another day in the Tory leadership election that will eventually see approximately 120,000 members of the Conservative Party electing the next prime minister of the 66,000,000 people living in the United Kingdom. The remaining candidates need at least 33 votes from MPs to move on. Those and/or the last place candidate will be eliminated. The question today is whether Dominic Raab, Sajid Javid, and Rory Stewart can move to the next round along with the front runner Boris Johnson and his two not-really-close-but-someone-has-to-be-a-significant competitors, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove.
But what happens after today’s vote? The BBC created a graphic explaining it all.
It’s a simple concept: a calendar that uses shades and outline boxes to highlight particular dates.
But the elephant in this particular Westminster cloakroom is that the Tories are using all this time whilst the Brexit clock keeps ticking down to 31 October.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
One of the things we missed covering last week whilst I was on holiday? The dust up in the Gulf of Oman, located near the Strait of Hormuz, where two foreign ships were attacked by mines or other explosive devices. The United States blames Iran and, of course, Iran denies it. The thing is, an inordinate amount of oil flows through the Strait, connecting the petroleum-driven economies of the West to the instability in the Middle East. Thankfully we have a graphic from the Guardian to explain just what is going on there.
The above is a screenshot from the article, one of several graphics. There is a stacked bar chart showing the total volume of oil in transit, and the Strait’s share of it. Spoiler: it’s significant. We all know how I feel about stacked bars: not the biggest fan.
There are, of course, locator maps showing the locations of the attacked ships. We also have some photographs showing the damage inflicted upon the tankers, as well as some evidence of what the US claims is Iranian activities. (Side note: isn’t it great that when the US really wants the world to trust its intelligence agencies the White House has been doing nothing but trashing said intelligence agencies?)
The above, however, is a simple map showing the political fault line in the Middle East. It gets to the heart of the potential conflict here being not a US vs. Iran war, but a Saudi Arabia vs. Iran war. After all, relations between the Saudis and the Trumps have warmed significantly since the Obama administration. And not shown in the map is the role of Israel, which, again has seen a significant warming in relations between Trump and Netanyahu, and which has also been quietly supporting Saudi Arabia in its undeclared war against Iran, to date fought only with proxies, most notably in Yemen.
In other words, the Middle East is a complicated and complex tinder box, built next to a few nuclear reactors, all of which just happen to sit atop vast reserves of oil and natural gas. So the best thing to do? Clearly start exploding things.
Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian graphics department.
At least in certain fields. Happy Thursday all. For me, however, it’s more of a Friday. I am on holiday the next several days, so until I resume posting mid-next week, I will leave you with an xkcd graphic that looks at how what you study can kill you. I think all my economist colleagues are safe.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
This piece from the New York Times isn’t really even a graphic. It’s a factette, or small fact. The article is about how tariffs are raising the price of certain goods, in this case a bicycle. Tariffs do not add money to the US Treasury, they are instead an additional price paid by US consumers on goods—not services—originating from outside the US.
Sometimes a big chart is not as impactful as one big number. And here, in the context of this story, a graphic showing trade flows between the US and Mexico may have been useful. But the real gut punch is showing how the tariffs on Mexico, for this one particular bike, could cost the US consumer an additional $90. A tariff is just another word for a tax paid by the American consumer.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Last week the Philadelphia area experienced a mini tornado outbreak with three straight days of watches and warnings. Of course further west in the traditional Tornado Alley, far more storms of far greater intensity were wreaking havoc. But with tornado warnings going off every few minutes just outside the city of Philadelphia, it was hard to concentrate on storms in, say, Oklahoma.
But the New York Times did. And they put together a nice graphic showing the timeline of the outbreak using small multiples to show where the tornado reports were located on 12 consecutive days.
Of course the day of that publication, 29 May, would see another few dozen, even in and around Philadelphia. Consequently, the graphic could have been extended to a day 13. But that would have been rather unlucky.
From a design standpoint, the really nice element of this graphic is that it works so well in black and white. The graphic serves as a reminder that good graphics need not be super colourful and flashy to have impact.
Credit for the piece goes to Weiyi Cai and Jason Kao.
Last week I had three different discussions with people about some of the impact of climate change upon the United States. However, what did not really come up in those conversations was the environmental changes set to befall the United States. And by environment, I explicitly mean how the flora of the US will change.
Why? Well, as warmer climates spread north, that means tropical and subtropical plants can follow warmer temperatures northward into lands previously too cold. And they could replace the species native to those lands, who evolved adaptations for their particular climate.
Thankfully, last week the New York Times published a piece that explored how those impacts could be felt. Hardiness zones are a concept designed to tell gardeners when and where to plant certain crops. And while the US Department of Agriculture has a detailed version useful to horticulturists, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produces a very similar version for the purpose of climate studies. And when you group those hardiness levels by the forecast lowest temperatures in an area, you get this.
There you have it, the forecast change to plant zones.
From a design standpoint, I like the idea of the colour shift here. However, where it breaks seems odd. Though it could be more influenced by the underlying classifications than I understand. The split occurs at 0ºF, which is well below freezing. I wonder if the freezing point, 32ºF could have been used instead. I also wonder if adding Celsius units above the same legend could be done to make the piece more accessible to a broader audience.
Otherwise, it’s a nice use of small multiples. And from the editorial design standpoint, I like how the article’s text above the graphic makes use of a six-column layout to add some dynamic contrast to what is essentially a three-column layout for the graphics.
Credit for the piece goes to Nadja Popovich.
Happy Friday, all. Welcome to the end of the week. Today is just a little post from xkcd looking at the time span of the Wild West compared to the genre of the Wild West. The genre has lasted longer than the historical era. Kind of like how the television show M*A*S*H lasted far longer than the actual Korean War in which it was set.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Earlier this month the Economist published an article that looked at a different way of measuring the economic output of North Korea. The state is so secretive that the publicly available data we all rely on for almost every country is not available. Nor would we necessarily believe their figures. So we have to rely on other measures to estimate the North Korean economy.
The article is about how luminosity, i.e. the lights on seen from space at night, can be used as a proxy for economic activity in the reclusive state.
The article is a fascinating read and uses a scatter plot to show the correlation between luminosity and GDP per capita then how that translates to North Korea, comparing it to older models.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
