interactive design – Page 17

American College Football Part Deux

A couple of weeks ago I shared a map from the New York Times that looked at American college football programme loyalty. And I quipped that none of it made sense to me as someone born and raised in the Northeast. The New York Times followed that piece up with another that looks solely at Facebook likes of college football via likes for any team. Not surprisingly the sport does not do too well in the Northeast. But it does appear quite popular in other regions of the country.

Credit for the piece goes to Neil Irwin and Kevin Quealy.

Thanksgiving Recipes by State

Today is an American holiday: Thanksgiving. We give thanks that European diseases and military technology allowed us to remove the native population for colonisation of the continent. We do that by watching American football and eating lots and lots of food. For dessert, well, we have dessert. But also gluttonous amounts of shopping. So in that spirit, here is the New York Times’ presentation of Thanksgiving recipes per state. The description is followed by an expandable recipe.

To be fair, I really am a fan of shoofly pie. But that’s just me.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.

Whence do US Retail Sales Come?

Today’s piece comes from the Wall Street Journal. It looks at US retail and foodservice spending through different types of stores.

I take issue with a few things, firstly the tree map. Because it’s not really a tree map. Another thing I am not keen on is the comparison feature in the piece. The user can select up to three types of stores to compare. And while the result works in the line chart—three lines—the bar chart devolves into a near useless component. There is no easy way to compare the actual lengths of the individual bars short of mousing over and scribbling down each individual datapoint. In the particular case here, I likely would have changed from bars to line. Because that way I can compare the actual magnitude of each store type.

Credit for the piece goes to Dan Hill.

After the Curtain Dropped

Last week we covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lasting impact in former East Germany vs. former West Germany. This week we look at a piece from Bloomberg Businessweek that looks more broadly at Eastern Europe.

The piece scrolls with the charts updating based upon the available text. And within that text are highlighted keywords with which the user can interact to highlight data within the charts.

Credit for the piece goes to Alex McIntyre, Peter Coy, Christopher Cannon, and Blacki Migliozzi.

We All Have to Die…But How?

As the title says, we are all going to die one of these days. But what are the odds that Ebola will kill you? Turns out it is fairly small. Smaller than your pyjamas catching on fire and killing you. Or even your regular clothes catching fire. How did I know that? Well, the Washington Post put together a nice interactive piece to do just that. It starts you out at Ebola and works up to the most likely causes of death. If you are looking for your morning pick-me-up, this might not be it. Fair warning.

Credit for the piece goes to Richard Johnson and Lazaro Gamio.

Satellites

Naturally we have talked a lot about Rosetta and Philae the last few weeks. While Philae has exhausted its battery supply, Rosetta continues to orbit Comet 67P as that satellite’s own satellite. But what about Earth? What about our satellites? Thankfully the folks over at Quartz mapped that out for us in this great graphic. It portrays all the known functioning satellites in Earth’s orbit, their range, and launch weight.

You can switch which variable colour encodes, e.g. country or age. And then by clicking on a satellite you can see its orbit height—this can also be animated. And for a neat little bit, the grey circle with the dotted line represents the International Space Station. The dot its launch weight, the dotted line its current weight. The one I have selected is the X-37B unmanned space plane operated by the US Air Force.

Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky and Tim Fernholz.

Can You Land Philae

Today is Friday, so let’s take it a bit easy. You have heard of Philae and the comet landing. But we also know now that it bounced upon landing. But could you do any better? The BBC produced this game to let you try to do just that.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Mapping Equal Populations

After a week of some depressing material. Let’s lighten things up. Since, you know, it is a Friday.

Two weeks ago we looked at comparisons of actual geographic area. These are sometimes useful comparisons. But more often than not we are talking about the people that live in said areas. And speaking as someone who has lived in either suburbs of big cities or within big cities my entire life, comprehending the not-do-dense rural flyover states is a bit hard to do. Thankfully Ben Blatt over at Slate put together a nice interactive piece that allows you to get a better sense of just how empty the middle of the country really is. (Hint, it is empty.)

Here we take a look at comparing the East and West coasts to Chicago. Turns out you have to go pretty far from the shores of Lake Michigan to equal the population of the two coasts. That’s a lot of flyover.

Credit for the piece goes to Ben Blatt.

University Graduation

Today’s piece from the Washington Post examines the graduation rates of 100 people who enrolled at university in 2002. The data set tracked them over the following six years.

Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron.

Eli Manning’s Brother and the Record Books

Two weekends ago Eli Manning’s brother accomplished a feat in American football. And it was not in Indianapolis. The New York Times documented the story in an interactive article.

I have no idea who most of these people are…

In fairness, I generally do not follow American football. I am largely a one sport person and that sport is baseball. But since the active baseball season is over—baseball ends when the Red Sox stop playing—I figured the rest of you might enjoy this.

Credit for the piece goes to Gregor Aisch and Kevin Quealy.