50 Great Examples of Data Visualization
Wrapping your brain around data online can be challenging, especially when dealing with huge volumes of information. And trying to find related content can also be difficult, depending on what data you’re looking for. But data visualizations can make all of that much easier, allowing you to see the concepts that you’re learning about in a more interesting, and often more useful manner. Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter.
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Staggering excess
Business Insider calls this stacked bar chart "staggering" (link). Maybe they are referring to its complexity. Is there a reason to include all the fine details? The details serve little purpose other than to shout at readers that there is a lot of data behind this chart. It is impossible to compare the different drugs on the individual harmful effects based on reading this chart.
A Beautiful Poster Packed With a Year of Global Weather Data
The Weather Radials poster is about as much meteorological data as you can cram onto a single sheet of paper. Raureif GmbH Each day of 2013 is represented by a single line.
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches - Smashing Magazine
About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running … More about Vitaly Friedman … Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive.
40 Useful and Creative Infographics
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100 Diagrams That Changed the World
Since the dawn of recorded history, we’ve been using visual depictions to map the Earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human body, organize the natural world, perform music, and even concretize abstract concepts like consciousness and love. 100 Diagrams That Changed the World (public library) by investigative journalist and documentarian Scott Christianson chronicles the history of our evolving understanding of the world through humanity’s most groundbreaking sketches, illustrations, and drawings, ranging from cave paintings to The Rosetta Stone to Moses Harris’s color wheel to Tim Berners-Lee’s flowchart for a “mesh” information management system, the original blueprint for the world wide web. It appears that no great diagram is solely authored by its creator. Most of those described here were the culmination of centuries of accumulated knowledge. Most arose from collaboration (and oftentimes in competition) with others. Christianson offers a definition:
Infographic of the Day: Twitter Tracks the Entire Country's Mood
Every tweet, no matter how trivial, reveals the writer's mood, through word choice--It can be as obvious as "happy" or as subtle as "diamond." Now imagine if you could take that knowledge, scale it up to the entire Twitter-verse, and use it to gauge the entire country's mood? That's exactly what Alan Mislove, a computer scientist, at Northeastern University, did, using 300 million tweets in real time. Check it out in action, over time--you can actually see moods rising at the end of the work day, and that same pattern gets repeated across time zones:
This site publishes high-touch, time-intensive data visualizations (and has a business that sustains it)
Over 7,000 artists played in the New York City area in 2013. Only 21 of those later made it, really made it, headlining at a venue with an over 3,000-person capacity — among them, bigger names like Chance the Rapper, X Ambassadors, Sam Smith, and Sylvan Esso. I learned this sort of random but fascinating tidbit from a data visualization titled “The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big,” from the site The Pudding. The Pudding is the home to high-touch, painstakingly crafted data visualizations — what the site calls “visual essays” — that are distinct in their obsessive complexity over points of cultural curiosity.
What Your Web Design Says About You (Infographic)
Font and color choices in a website say certain things about the owner of the site. Though colors and symbols may have different meanings in other cultures, this only reaffirms the notion that design choices do affect the perception of the user, which in turn affects the message attempting to be conveyed. Here is an infographic that delves into the meanings of fonts and colors in the context of web design.
Data visualisation: how Alberto Cairo creates a functional art
It's not enough for visualisations to string the correct numbers together, they should - in the words of William Morris - be beautiful and useful. And one of the leading experts in making data beautiful is Alberto Cairo - who teaches information graphics and visualisation at the University of Miami's School of Communication. His latest book, The Functional Art, is a comprehensive guide not only to how to do it; but how to get it right, too. And, if you're interested in data visualisation, you must not only read this but absorb each of the lessons he teaches so patiently. It's worth checking out, even if producing charts is not your day job.
10 Coolest Typographic Infographics
A picture is worth a thousand words. But when that picture is itself made of words, your mileage may vary. Take the case of type-based infographics. Bad use of type clutters an image; it acts as decoration – yet becomes a roadblock to information transfer. However, good use of type can add an extra layer of data to a graphic. Text and type within an infographic can be used to place high-density packets of information within a larger context.
The Lives of 10 Famous Painters, Visualized as Minimalist Infographic Biographies
By Maria Popova For their latest masterpiece, my friend Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us such gems as a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visualization of global brain drain, and visual histories of the Nobel Prize and the 100 geniuses of language — have teamed up with illustrator Michela Buttignol to visualize the lives of ten famous painters, using the visual metaphors of painting and the specific stylistic preferences — shapes, colors, proportions — of each artist. Each visual biography depicts key biographical moments — births, deaths, love affairs, marriages, birth of children, travel — as well as notable and curious features like handedness (mostly righties, with the exception of Klee), astrological sign, and connections. For a closer look, click each image to view the full-size version: