Results tagged “infographics”

In a remarkably fast evolution from what-if rumination on a blog to cutting-edge news dissemination, Alex Kerin's idea last year of how to use Twitter to share sparkline infographics on Twitter was used by the Wall Street Journal to share unemployment statistics.

It's a clever hack, as well-explained by the Journal's own Zach Seward, building on work by The Data Collective to create a web-based sparktweet tool. The results really do an effective job of showing how compelling news can be when it embraces a new medium instead of fighting against its constraints.

But aside from sharing interesting data in a novel way, what's most remarkable about the example is how quickly new ideas can bubble up from creative individuals all the way to powerful media institutions with huge reach. And it only happens if those creators blog about what they've done.

More in this vein:

• Sparklines in the Times...
• Pixels are the New Pies

Children's stories should clearly communicate their messages.

Unambiguous, no?

An interesting infographic trend: Square blocks of color are now being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart. Some recent examples are shown here.

The chart on the left is from a NY Times story on atheism and the afterlife, making its choice of colors seem a little weird. And is that empty white block in the center supposed to represent the empty hole in our souls? On the right, a detail from a Wired story on how much Americans spend on gadgets. Charles M. Blow created the graphic for the Times; Arno Ghelfi did the honors for Wired.

This switch raises some interesting questions.

• Is the square format more familiar to readers now because of the preponderance of the pixel in pop culture?
• There's a lot of leeway in choosing the shape of individual regions, since the only constraint is that they use the proper number of squares -- what are the best practices here?
• Finally, a productive use of all that time spent playing Tetris?
• How come it took so long to figure out that pie charts are pretty hard to actually glean data from?
• Was there a "Designing For Print" conference somewhere six months ago where a speaker made a particularly compelling case for squares over circles?

Somewhat obliquely related, my series of posts last year on 100 Perfect Pixels, featuring Nike Plus, Amazon's Gold Box and Vox's Neighborhood.

From CNN, a terrifying infographic showing the percentage of the population that's obese, on a state-by-state basis. The data shows the march of the obesity epidemic over the past 20 years.

And what the hell are they eating in Mississippi?

Infographics and Peanut Butter week at dashes.com continues, this time with a terrific set of pie charts from Craig Robinson. You might know Craig as creator of Flip Flop Flyin', whom we've loved for ages as creator of minipops.

He's done something great, though, with Personal Pies. Besides being entertaining, it's doomed me forever to being cursed to think "That Flip Flop Flyin' guy rubs 'em out to Madonna". So there's that.

Or, "Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt".

Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing as glaring as who was missing from the room was the talk of a new bubble. I can't even count how many blog posts and skeptical articles I read referring to Bubble 2.0.

I don't really have an opinion either way if there's another bubble inflating right now, but I think it's interesting to take a look at the companies that have already flipped and to compare them to the acquisitions after the deflation of the Web 1.0 bubble. Keep in mind, during the pre-Y2K bubble, the goal was to IPO and become fabulously wealthy; Indeed, being "built to flip" was a near-epithet five years ago. (Whatever happened to that Pyra company, anyway?)