Tag: information design

  • Where’s the Axis

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    Brendan Barry
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    We’re starting this week with an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer. It looks at the increasing number of guns confiscated by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at Philadelphia International Airport. Now while this is a problem we could discuss, one of the graphics therein has a problem that we’ll discuss here. We have a pretty…

  • Be Ambitious

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    Brendan Barry
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    Well it’s Friday. Congratulations on making it to the weekend. I often spend my weekends working on personal projects, because I have goals and things I’m trying to do. In other words, I have ambitions. That’s why this piece from Indexed was so funny. One cannot go wrong with a Venn diagram. Credit for the…

  • Regal Birthplaces

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    Brendan Barry
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    Earlier this week marked the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne of the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth realms. There are many graphics about the length of her reign and the numerous prime ministers and presidents she has met over the years. But I actually enjoyed this article from the BBC as…

  • Let There Be Light

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    Brendan Barry
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    In several decades… Just a quick little piece today, a neat illustration from the BBC that shows how the process of nuclear fusion works. The graphic supports an article detailing a significant breakthrough in the development of nuclear fusion. Long story short, a smaller sort-of prototype successfully proved the design underpinning a much larger fusion…

  • Can You Hit the High Notes?

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    Brendan Barry
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    This is an older piece that I stumbled across doing some other work. I felt like it needed sharing. The interactive graphic shows the high and low note vocal ranges of major musical artists. Interactive controls allow the user to sort the bars by the greatest vocal range, high notes, or low notes. Colour coding…

  • Dots Beat Bars

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today is just a quick little follow-up to my post from Monday. There I talked about how a Boston Globe piece using three-dimensional columns to show snowfall amounts in last weekend’s blizzard failed to clearly communicate the data. Then I showed a map from the National Weather Service (NWS) that showed the snowfall ranges over…

  • How Accurate Is Punxsutawney Phil?

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    Brendan Barry
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    For those unfamiliar with Groundhog Day—the event, not the film, because as it happens your author has never seen the film—since 1887 in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (60 miles east-northeast of Pittsburgh) a groundhog named Phil has risen from his slumber, climbed out of his burrow, and went to see if he could see…

  • America’s Crime Problem

    America’s Crime Problem

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    Brendan Barry
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    During the pandemic, media reports of the rise of crime have inundated American households. Violent crimes, we are told, are at record highs. One wonders if society is on the verge of collapse. But last night a few friends asked me to take a look at the data during the pandemic (2020–2021) and see what…

  • Obfuscating Bars

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    Brendan Barry
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    On Friday, I mentioned in brief that the East Coast was preparing for a storm. One of the cities the storm impacted was Boston and naturally the Boston Globe covered the story. One aspect the paper covered? The snowfall amounts. They did so like this: This graphic fails to communicate the breadth and literal depth…

  • I Call Them Life Tiles

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    Brendan Barry
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    Happy Friday, everyone. Here in the United States’ Northeast Corridor we’re looking forward to a potentially powerful nor’easter that could be the first real snowstorm to hit Philadelphia all winter. (Dumb La Niña.) But I’ve also recently started working in a new sketchbook. (It happens often.) But that’s why I thought this graphic from Indexed…