Regardless of your politics, this chart is a great example of how data can tell a story. It’s a very simple graph by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life showing the changing attitudes about same-sex marriage. It shows that in the past couple of years, people have begun to be in favor of same-sex marriage.
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This Scientific American article by Mark Fischetti and infographic by Jen Christiansen detail the consumption of water usage throughout the world. Jen used a Sankey diagram to show the top 10 water consuming countries and how their water was being used. One of Mark’s first points in the article is that population is the largest factor of water consumption. So I wonder why population adjusted numbers weren’t used. Many of the article’s commenters felt the same way. One posted a few of the countries per capita water use:
China: 2781 lts/day, India: 2591 lts/day, US: 7175 lts/day, Japan: 3752 lts/day

The way you display your data depends on the story you’re trying to tell. In this case, I wonder if the message could be better by using per capita.

[via @ChristiansenJen]

Recently there’s been a spate of infographic tools popping up (e.g., easel.ly, venngage, and infogr.am). Okay, I’m not sure if 3 qualifies as a spate, but it sure seemed like a lot in a short period of time. I gave Infogr.am a whirl, and it appears to be the front runner in terms of capabilities. Unlike easel.ly, you can *actually input data* into your infographic! What a novel concept. Venngage was hit and miss in terms of it accepting the data I entered. Infogr.am also has a bug in that you can’t have the number 0 in your data. Go figure.
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TileMill is a tool that makes it easy to create interactive maps. Soon they will be adding some new features that will treat maps more like images in terms of modifying the look and feel. This will allow you to apply blending to polygons and GIS data.

AJ Ashton made these examples that are quite compelling, beautiful, and just touch on the possibilities. I can envision many different types of data being drawn with blending techniques as opposed to simply flow diagrams and the like. It will be interesting to see what comes out of these new features.

[via @bonnie]

So I got to thinking, since I’m on this pie chart kick, “what would be the worst pie chart ever?” And I decided it would be a Venn diagram made with pie charts. I laughed to myself, imagining such a creation. Then I thought, somebody’s probably done this. And indeed, there’s an app for that.

At long last, the power of Venn diagrams and pie charts combine to turn the world of mathematics on its head! If you’ve ever felt the need to create Venn diagrams with pie charts, or wished your pie charts could overlap to provide even more informative data, then Venn Pie-agrams is the app for you!

I’ll leave it at that.

Wow, Manuel Lima, Senior UX Designer at Bing, got through a world of information in this 11 minute RSA Animate video. He spoke about the topic for which we all know him – networks. Beginning with the tree as a symbol of relationships (e.g., Aristotle’s Tree of Knowledge), Manuel then quickly sweeps through many concepts through the centuries to finally land on a modern day approach to relational information, the web or network. As trees are no longer capable of representing the complexities of the modern world, we have to find new ways to visualize these structures or perhaps even find a universal structure. His talk is loaded with beautiful examples of trees and networks.

If this fast paced animation is above your processing capacity, you can view the more austere real world video of Manuel instead. It has the bonus of an interesting interview with him in the last 6 minutes.

The OECD’s Better Life Index which debuted last year to much fanfare has been updated with some great new features by Moritz Stefaner.

The concept and beauty of the original piece remain intact. However, the experience is made better by the ability to compare to different demographics. For instance, after I adjust my Better Life settings, I can see how my settings compare to other women my age in the US, or to French men. It’s fun to compare to different people around the world and watch the flowers readjust themselves to the various comparisons. It invokes a sense of global community and humanity.
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Visual.ly analyzed the top 30 infographics posted on their site and determined that data visualization doesn’t matter:

Data visualization certainly matters when it comes to conveying information effectively, but when it comes to sharing, the answer is no: having data to represent is not a critical ingredient in infographics. More than half, or 53%, of the top 30 graphics do not contain data visualization. And by data visualization, we mean visual objects that are sized, colored, or positioned to represent numerical values.

I think what they actually mean is that data visualization is not the sole factor of a successful visualization. Since they are only analyzing the top 30 infographics, the minority 47% that had data visualization are still very successful. It would be a different story if the 53% of infographics without dataviz were the top successes and the 47% with dataviz were the bottom losers.

My hunch is that the successful infographics posted on Visual.ly are popular because, like other viral content, they strike a nerve, are of the moment, are humorous yet relevant, or have some other je ne sais quoi.

I’m a sucker for anything cute and bubbly, and the U.K. Energy Consumption Guide created by Epiphany is no exception. It combines a vertical scrolling site with a lot of data visualization about different types of fuel and how they’ve been used historically. Most of the charts are solid and the interaction adds an even higher level of clarity and understanding.

While I like this circle packing chart, I’m sure there will be doubters. It’s very similar to McCandless’ natural gas visualization that received a lot of flack. But generally speaking, anything that is engaging and welcoming garners a little extra time from the visitor to make sense of it.