Apps
8 posts
The colors you choose to visualize data can completely shift what you convey to a reader. With an ominous color palette, a graphic meant to be light and fun comes off the wrong way. Or the other way around. You wouldn’t use Comic Sans for your résumé (right…?), so choose colors that fit the topic. Viz Palette, made by Elijah Meeks and Susie Lu, aims to make the choosing part...
Picking colors is one my favorite things to do with visualization when I’m not in a rush for time. But when I can spare the minutes to pick and choose, it’s useful to have a quick reference. ColorBrewer is the go-to, but CARTOColors is a simpler take. It just shows you a bunch of schemes at once for sequential, diverging, and qualitative data. [via @maartenzam] Tags: color
When you first get a CSV file, sometimes it’s useful to poke at it a bit to see what’s there. Sometimes you need to restructure the data or sort it in some non-straightforward way. Tad is a lightweight desktop application that helps with this early stage of data gathering, “designed to fit in to the workflow of data engineers and data scientists.” It’s free and open source. I played around...
Some say annotation is the most important layer for charts meant for public consumption. It directs readers where to look and what’s important. But the process is not always straightforward. ChartAccent is an application slash research project that aims to make annotation easier. Plug in some data, make a chart, and do some clicking and dragging. Done. Tags: annotation
Default color schemes are often horrible, but spending a lot of time putting together color schemes when you don’t have a lot of minutes is also horrible. I Want Hue by Mathieu Jacomy at the Sciences-Po Medialab lets you set a few options, and it spits out a palette for your visualization. Tags: color
Map making is a finicky challenge where oftentimes your map data — points, lines, and polygons — must align just right with your external data that exists as a CSV file or related. Mapshaper is an online tool that helps you massage your geographic data to where it needs to be. The online application has been around for a while, but I only recently used it, and it’s kind of...
A challenge of using geographic maps to show data is that larger regions inevitably get more visual real estate. Cartograms try to solve this problem by sizing regions by the data instead of land mass. Tilegrams by Pitch Interactive makes it easy to construct tiled versions at the US state level. Upload your data, adjust the resolution to your liking, and export for your own purposes. Nice. Tags: cartogram, Pitch...
Sometimes you need a color scheme quick, and ColorBrewer is typically the de facto, but it has some limitations. You can’t just choose any color you want as a starting point, and there is a set number of color schemes. Colorgorical by Connor Gramazio on the other hand lets you set parameters and color ranges, and it spits out a scheme with perceptual differences. The interface is a bit rough,...