Yesterday we looked at the USA Today’s piece on the search for MH 370. Today we look at the New York Times, which has been running a series of maps that offer increasing amounts of detail on the context for the search.
Credit for the piece goes to Josh Keller, Sergio PeÇanha, Shreeya Sinha, Archie Tse, Matthew L. Wald, Tim Wallace, Derek Watkins, and Karen Yourish.
I often rail against the use of maps. I often hear “They’re pretty!” or “They’re colourful!” or “But I really do know where Guatemala is!” or “I can see my house!”. They’re often just a crutch, unless you can use them to show an actual geographic distribution. Thankfully from Quartz we get a series of small multiple maps that look at the geographic distribution of top trading partners for a select set of geographies.
For this set, I think the colours could be the same and perhaps the chosen country perhaps outlined or otherwise signalled on the map. (Only because my utter lack of faith in people being able to identify countries on a map.) Still, it’s a good piece overall that makes nice use of maps.
Credit for the piece goes to David Yanofsky.
I do not know a thing about horses. I leave that knowledge to others in my family. However, this piece from the South China Morning Post explains quite a bit of why the thoroughbred is such a famous type of horse for racing.
Credit for the piece goes to Alberto Lucas López.
Spring training has begun for baseball fans. The glow from the Red Sox victory last October is fading as we now wonder if we can repeat. Fans of other teams now wonder if this is their year. Over at SB Nation, an article plotted 29 baseball teams—ignoring the Dodgers— and looked at their chances in the upcoming years. The article continues using the chart to explain which teams fall where.
And for the designers, note the type choice for “Nope”.
Credit for the piece goes to Grant Brisbee.
Not “the Ukraine” as it is (admittedly) fun to do in pop-culture references to Seinfeld. This comes from the Washington Post and the article tries to show that the protests in Kiev are not necessarily a vast majority against the government. Certainly the opposition is strong, but there is also a very strong pro-government movement. Why? Because in the broadest of senses, Ukraine is where the West, i.e. the European Union, meets the East, i.e. Russia.
Credit for putting this all together goes to Max Fisher. Credit for each of the original graphics is to their respective designers whom I cannot identify.
Today’s piece comes from this past weekend. The New York Times looked at how states fell on various politically sensitive issues, e.g. abortion and same-sex marriage, depending upon the political control of the executive and legislative functions of each state. In other words, which states have passed legislation to regulate abortion or same-sex marriage? States controlled by Democrats, or states controlled by Republicans?
I am not terribly keen on the clustered bubbles. Showing the population of each state could be handled better by different chart forms. But to a certain extent in this piece, the population figures are secondary to the aggregate of people living in blue or red states. And in that case, while you cannot easily visualise the number of people living in the aggregates, you can at least get a feel for which group is home to more people.
Credit for the piece goes to Haeyoun Park, Jeremy Ashkenas, and Mike Bostock.
Well, travel for the teams, not you. It’s a big issue in Brazil because unlike the last couple of times, the teams need to travel big distances to reach the cities where they play their matches. Thankfully, to explain just how far some of these distances are for some of these teams, Quartz put together a nice article with quite a few graphics.
This graphic in particular juxtaposes the travels of the US team and the Argentinian team. Who do you think has it easier?
Credit for the piece goes to Jason Karaian and Ritchie King.
Today’s piece maps and charts comes from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The piece combines maps and charting components to detail preventable hospitalisations and emergency room use in the state of Illinois.
Ordinarily I would prefer just one map, however, in this case the designers realised that a regional map—with its larger surface area—need not be as large as the county map. Some additional elements worth noting is the area devoted to the human explanation of the categories, which might otherwise be difficult to understand.
Credit for the piece goes to Axis Maps.
NBC News and Esquire magazine published results from their August survey of some 2000+ respondents that attempted to define the New American Center, i.e. the political persuasions of the majority of the country excepting the radical right and the loony left. For the purposes of Coffee Spoons, I am most interested in looking at the data visualisation and the infographics that result.
Both NBC News and Esquire visualised the results. While I could write two long blog posts looking at both of them, for today, it is more important to look more at the fundamental design difference between the two.
NBC News opted for a design direction emphasising data first. Perhaps because NBC is a news platform, their focus was on the clean communication of the data. Looking
On the other hand, Esquire opted for a more sensationalised direction. The same data points used for the screenshot above creates this graphic below. Not only is less data is contained, less context given, less subtlety and nuance captured, it also is just difficult to read. Is the 59% supposed to be the area of the cross filled in? Its length? Why is it three-dimensional? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear? At first glance, I ignore the horizontal wings and focus solely on the vertical length of the main bar.
For a useful representation of data, I think NBC News clearly wins. But that both organisations used the same data to craft their separate results, this story on the New American Center is useful for comparing two different design directions and the results thereof.
No designers are specifically mentioned, at least not that I could find, so credit for each piece goes to its respective owner, i.e. NBC News or Esquire.
Normally this would be a Friday post. But, for those of you fellow Red Sox fans who happen to live near enough to Fenway to go catch a game, Wednesday night is Dollar Beard Night. This graphic by the Red Sox details the different types of beards worn by Red Sox players this year. It’s like the bunch of idiots of 2004.
Wednesday night if you show up to Fenway with a beard, you can get a $1 ticket for Dollar Beard Night. Hence why posting this Friday would do you fellow Red Sox fans no good.
Credit for the piece goes to the Red Sox.
