Data labels
27 posts
The folks at FiveThirtyEight were excited about the following dataviz they published last week two weeks ago, illustrating the progression of vote-counting by state. (link) That was indeed the unique and confusing feature of the 2020 Presidential election in the States. For those outside the U.S., what happened (by and large) was that many Americans, skewing Biden supporters, voted by mail before Election Day but their votes were sometimes counted...
According to the Conference Board, the pandemic will not deter U.S. consumers from emptying their wallets this holiday season. Here's a chart that shows their expectation (link): A few little things make this chart work: The "More" category is placed on the left, as English-speaking countries tend to be read Left-to-Right, and it is also given the deepest green, drawing our attention. Only the "More" segments have data labels....
Just found this beauty deep in my submission pile (from Howie H.): What's great about this pie chart is the story it's trying to tell. Almost half of the electorate did not vote in Texas in the 2016 Presidential election. The designer successfully draws my attention to the white sector that makes the point. There are a few problems. Showing two decimals is too much precision. The purple sector is...
The creative process is sometimes described in terms of diverge-converge cycles. The diverge step involves experimentation and rewards suspending disbelief, while excesses are curbed and concepts refined during the converge step. Richard Brath's just-released book Visualizing with Text is an important resource that expands our appreciation for the place of text in visual displays. Books on data visualization fall into recognizable types, of which two popular ones are the style...
I saw this chart on an NYU marketing twitter account: The graphical design is not easy on our eyes. It's just hard to read for various reasons. The headline sounds like a subject line from an email. The subheaders are long, and differ only by a single word. Even if one prefers pie charts, they can be improved by following a few guidelines. First, start the first sector at the...
Twitterstan wanted to vote the following infographic off the island: (The publisher's website is here but I can't find a direct link to this graphic.) The mishap is particularly galling given the controversy swirling around this year's A-Level results in the U.K. For U.S. readers, you can think of A-Levels as SAT Subject Tests, which in the U.K. are required of all university applicants, and represent the most important, if...
I knew I had to remake this chart. The simple message of this chart is hidden behind layers of visual complexity. What the analyst wants readers to focus on (as discerned from the text on the right) is the red line, the seven-day moving average of new hospital admissions due to Covid-19 in Texas. My eyes kept wandering away from the line. It's the sideway data labels on the columns....
Joe N, a longtime reader, tweeted about the following chart, by the People's Policy Project: This is a simple column chart containing only two numbers, far exceeded by the count of labels and gridlines. I look at charts like the lady staring at these Ad Reinhardts: My artist friends say the black squares are not the same, if you look hard enough. Here is what I learned after one...
Like many others, some Floridians are questioning their state's Covid statistics. It's clear there are numerous "degrees of freedom" for politicians to manipulate the numbers. What's not clear is who's influencing these decisions. Are they public-health experts, donors, voters, or whom? A Twitter follower sent in the following chart, embedded in an informative article in Sun-Sentinel: I like the visual design. It's clean, and conveys a moderately complex concept effectively....
This Financial Times chart paints the picture of the emerging trend in Wimbledon men’s tennis: the average age of players has been rising, and hits 30 years old for the first time ever in 2019. The chart works brilliantly. Let's look at the design decisions that contributed to its success. The chart contains a good amount of data and the presentation is carefully layered, with the layers nicely tied to...