Posts filed under Graphics (394)

Helpful data visualisation advice from Microsoft:

Using Microsoft Office Excel 2007, you can quickly turn your data into a pie chart, and then give that pie chart a spiffy, professional look.

After you create a pie chart, you can rotate the slices for different perspectives. You can also focus on specific slices by pulling them out of the pie chart, or by changing the chart type to a pie of pie or bar of pie chart to draw attention to very small slices.

This strategy is especially useful when the data are meaningless but you need something to put on a slide to distract attention from what you are saying.

It’s getting on for winter here, and last Thursday was the fourth Thursday in the month before the winter solstice — the season for Thanksgiving weekend.  To celebrate, a pie chart from DegreeSearch.org, whose blog usually contains advice for students, but occasionally branches out into feats of infographic creativity.

At eagerpies, a redesign of a ‘boring bar chart’ according to graphic design principles, with steps including

• “color exercises an undeniable psychological attraction… It captures and holds attention, multiplies the number of readers, assures better retention of the information and , in short, increases the scope of the message.”
  
• We can add further perspicacity to the components of our pie by applying the Japanese concept of Ma. Ma represents space or a pause. It is, as Alan Fletcher describes, “the interval which gives shape to the whole”.
• The ability to perceive motion was fundamental to our paleolithic survival as saber tooth tigers ate those of us who didn’t see them coming.  By adding motion to our graphic we can capitalize on the base human response to ensure attention is directed where it is most desired.

And if you think the result is going to be a 3D exploded pie chart, you aren’t cynical enough.

A landmark in the (specialised) field of quantitative data visualisation satire.

James Curran drew my attention to this graph, from daily-infographic (original source not given, but appears to be Reddit) showing weather-related deaths in the US

The decrease in lightning deaths is impressive, but it doesn’t look as though there is much decline in tornado deaths, and apparently an increase in flood deaths.  Why isn’t forecasting helping more? Business Insider Australia also found this graph and was confused

You can pick out some major weather events — Katrina, floods, different major fatal hurricanes — from the chart, but the most interesting one is definitely lightening deaths. 

While the other systems are generally sporadic, lightning fatalities have declines. 

The explanation is simple: there are a lot more people now than in 1940 (about 2.5 times as many), so although the death rate has gone down, the number of deaths has stayed fairly stable. The National Severe Storms Lab (in Norman, Oklahoma, where they know from severe weather) gives this graph of death rates from tornados over more than a century

It would be even better to standardize by the population of the tornado-affected region, but that would be more difficult to define. It would also be better to remove some of the clutter from the graph: lose the grid lines and just have the points and a smooth curve. The message is still clear.

Deaths per million people were roughly steady until 1925, and have been decreasing since then, though the decrease may have levelled off.  The combination of sensible scaling by population, using a logarithmic scale, and adding a smoother and fitted line makes it easy to see the real trend in safety.  The first graph shows the danger of “letting the data speak for themselves”.

From the Motor Trade Association (via Scoop), an infographic that really would be better as a table or list rather than what appears to be a set of four pie charts.

Adding to the problems, the survey of 1063 vehicles was for a single half-hour period on one day, and 50% of the half-hour period was before the start of official darkness (though they say visibility was low enough to make headlights necessary).

From the University of San Francisco. The winners were all interactive maps, showing, respectively: pollution, population change, and child mortality.

Surprisingly addictive

• Color: match colours under a time limit
• Munsell Hue Test: arrange colours in order between two endpoints.

Keith Ng’s budget visualisation now has today’s newly-released Government budget.

(update) There’s also one at Stuff, by Harkanwal Singh (note that it uses nominal, not inflation-adjusted amounts)

The NZ stock exchange front page:

They know what their visitors are looking for, and they make it easy to find. (via @lyndonhood)

The information content in this video (7m38s) from PBS’ Off Book series is on the low side but its still an interesting watch, if only for a large collection of graphic designers’ appealing but appalling infographics.