Today is my Friday, everyone, as I am going away on holiday for a little bit. (You can expect me back mid-next week.) So, enjoy this design tip from xkcd on my favourite form of data visualisation: the pie chart.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Happy Friday, all. I’ve been busy preparing for a trip to Boston next week where I’ll continue to research my family’s history. But family trees and generational relationships between cousins can be confusing. Over at xkcd, however, it turns out the in-law relationships are more confusing.
I don’t think I blame him.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Huzzah. It’s another Friday and we made it. So today, courtesy of xkcd, we can look at some insider tricks for charting best practices.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
A week and a half ago my favourite band, Radiohead, played two shows in Philadelphia to close out their 2018 North America tour. I got to see the final of the two shows. And I decided to make this little piece over the weekend. Because it was totally fantastic.
The data shows that the band played a good mix of songs from across their discography. Admittedly they played nothing from Pablo Honey, but with the exception of Creep and Anyone Can Play Guitar along with some of the era’s b-sides, I really do not listen to that album all that often. They also skipped over Amnesiac, but did play five songs from my favourite album, Kid A, so, yeah, again, totally fantastic. Especially those final three songs to close the main setlist. Just brilliant.
Credit for this work is mine.
I like to think that becoming a good designer requires lots of work. And that means different types of work. Work pushing you to learn new skills. So this graphic by Jessica Hagy over on Indexed makes perfect sense. How good you at something ties into how much you work at it.
I pair the concept with Glenngarry Glen Ross and Alec Baldwin’s “Always be closing” speech. For your Friday entertainment, this is my more favourite rendition of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_vSirIJEsY&t=7s
Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.
For those of you not baseball fans, Tuesday is Major League Baseball’s trading deadline. By that evening, trades of players between teams are sort of over for the year. (Yes, I understand this is the non-waiver deadline and the waiver deadline is at the end of August, but that is complicated to explain.) And so as the end of July approaches, trades can reach a frenetic pace as teams try and fill the holes in their rosters before the playoffs begin in October.
Thankfully the folks over at Cut 4 put together a flow chart to help teams figure out how to fill those needs.
Of course by this point, a number of these players have already switched sides. In terms of design, this is more like a Friday post. Just enjoy it.
Credit for the piece goes to Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman.
A few weeks ago it was announced that NASA’s James Webb space telescope would see its launch delayed again. The successor to the Hubble telescope was originally supposed to launch several years ago, but now it won’t fly until at least 2021. Thankfully xkcd covered this slipping launch date.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
When I lived in Chicago, karaoke was definitely a thing I did. Billy Joel’s Piano Man was among the songs in my repertoire. And this Friday, well, we made it to another weekend. So raise a glass, toast Indexed, and forget about life for a while.
Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.
The World Cup continues. Well for a few teams. Some have already been eliminated from the Round of 16. But for those Americans rooting for Team America, well, if you have not yet figured it out, you got knocked out well before the World Cup even started by…Panama. And so you are stuck in the question of who’s next? Thankfully FiveThirtyEight, in addition to their fantastic live probabilities that we looked at the other day, put together a little quiz to help you find your new team.
You answer seven questions and you are told your new allegiance. Questions like this:
Naturally I took the quiz and discovered that in addition to England, I am cheering for…
Yep. Fantastic since I was just there in December and happened to love Stockholm. But what I love about this piece is how it uses data to create the newfound bond I have with Sweden. Often times you take a quiz and are given an answer without any sense of why the answer was correct. Here, FiveThirtyEight plots the seven different variables used to create your newfound personality and then shows you how you scored.
It’s Friday, it’s the World Cup. Have a great weekend. And in addition to England on Sunday, I’ll now be cheering for Sweden against Germany on Saturday.
Credit for the piece goes to Michael Caley, Rachael Dottle, Geoff Foster, Gus Wezerek, Daniel Levitt, Emily Scherer, and Jorge Lawerta.
Here in Philadelphia, the weekend is forecast to be not rainy, which is a departure from the last several weeks. So this piece from xkcd’s Randall Munroe seemed appropriate.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
