In my day job, I spend a lot of time creating charts in Excel and occasionally SAP Business Objects for data analysis. I'm no Edward Tufte (a Yale professor that has written several influential books on information design) when it comes to producing charts, but I'm always looking for better ways to convey information that tells a clear story. It seems like every few days, I run across a new infographic that is being passed around and while some are more a work of art, i.e. hand crafted in an illustration program rather than created directly from a data analysis program, I find them much more effective at getting a point across than straight prose.
One recent infographic I found interesting is from the web comic Xkcd titled Money. Using simple blocks representing US Dollars in hundreds, thousands, billions, and trillions, the author gives us a way to visually compare the cost of an iPod to the US federal budget. It's an impressive amount of work.
The New York times and Good Magazine are also good sources for infographics:
- A Collection of New York Times Infographics
- Good Magazine Infographics
While I'm not a big fan of flash on websites, I'm starting to come across more infographics that are flash based which allows for motion and changing variables. Here's a recent one from Asymco (Horace Dediu - Asymco: Visualizing Global Telecom Markets). In the motion chart, Horace has Mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants on the y axis and fixed broadband connections per 100 inhabitants on the x axis. The data points on the z axis illustrate the size of the country. The chart has a play button that starts at the year 2000 and runs through 2010. As the graphic progresses you can see how quickly some countries are adopting mobile phone subscriptions while others are more quick to adopt home broadband.
The other nice thing with the motion chart is that it is interactive. You can filter by country to narrow your results, and you can mouse over any data point to find out its value.
Here's a similar chart created for a BBC broadcast: Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats
This is a deep field and you can spend countless hours exploring the world of infographics, but I'm interested in tools that will make it easier to go from Excel to interactive graphics. Flash is on it's way out, and its likely successor is HTML5 . How long before I can export my data directly to an HTML5 based motion infographic? Likely, it's possible now, but that's going to take some more research.
Comments