This American Infographic
The goal of This American Infographic is to make a companion infographic for every episode of This American Life.
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kottke.org posts about infoviz
How people use Firefox
From a study on how people use Firefox, a heat map that highlights the most- and least-popular menu items. Bookmarks got the most use by far, followed by copy and paste. Copy was used about twice as much as paste, which suggests that about 50% of the time, people are copying things to be pasted into another program. Oh and not a single person used “Redo”. (via ben fry)
Mountain ranges as stock market infographics
Photographer Michael Najjar took some of his photos from the Andes and turned them into stock market infographics. Here’s Lehman Brothers stock price from 1980 to 2008.
Boy, their stock price really fell off a cliff there, didn’t it? The rest of the series is worth a look as well, although Najjar’s site features the worst use of Flash I’ve seen in many months…it automatically fullscreens and generally wastes a bunch of time with transitions. To find the rest of the photos, wait until the map starts loading and put your mouse at the bottom of the screen. A menu will s.l.o.w.l.y. slide up…High Altitude is what you’re looking for. (via info aesthetics)
Flickr seasons
This visualization represents a year in color (summer is at the top, winter at the bottom).
The images were taken of the Boston Common, courtesy of Flickr.
Famous movie quotes, graphed
Information visualization of some well-known movie quotes. A picture is, how you say, worth a thousand words:
The bottomless ocean
A representation of how deep the Mariana Trench is. Turns out it’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really deep. (via df)
Twitter code visualization
Watch Twitter’s engineering team and code base grow as the site gets more and more popular. It gets nuts at the end.
(thx, chris)
Timeline paintings
Ward Shelley paints these wonderfully intricate timelines of different things…his life, Frank Zappa’s career, and the history of the avant garde.
Found functions
Photographs of curves found in nature and the graphs and functions that go with them.
(via snarkmarket)
Measuring type
Clever idea: you can measure the amount of ink required to print different typefaces simply by writing them out with ballpoint pens. The pens themselves become the usage graph:
Update: You can also use this technique to represent which colors you draw with most often.
Beatles infographics
The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.
(thx, bryan)
Cost of healthcare
This clever graph by National Geographic shows the cost of healthcare compared to life expectancy in a number of countries. The way that the US healthcare expenditure is pictured entirely outside the confines of the graph’s scale and legend is a particularly effective design decision. (thx, jim)
The gravity of the solar system
Today on xkcd, an illustration showing the gravity wells of our solar system’s planets and some of their moons.
Two of Mars’ tiny moons barely have any gravity at all:
You could escape Deimos with a bike and a ramp. A thrown baseball could escape Phobos.
That’s great, but you forgot Pluto!
Lovely chocolate
One of many from Mary and Matt. It’s a stacked bar chart *and* candy. (via youngna)
Big cities, little states
New-ish thing from fake is the new real: outlines of the 100 most populous areas in the US. Some are cities and some are states.
The fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange). Each has been scaled and sorted according to population.
By themselves, the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metros are the three most populous areas in the US. (via snarkmarket)
The fall of empires
A visualization of the decline of the world’s four maritime empires (British, Portuguese, French, Spanish) from 1800 to 2009.
France pretty much just explodes around 1960.
There and back again
A wonderful character interaction map of the Lord of the Rings trilogy drawn by Randall Munroe. Here’s just a little part of it:
Human space exploration map
Beautiful map by National Geographic of human exploration of the solar system.
See also Race to the Moon at HistoryShots and Bryan Christie’s Mission(s) to Mars. (thx, byrne)
A three-year-old’s view of the NYC subway
This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to him on the poster.
Best viewed a bit large.
Update: There’s been a bit of confusion…this is not something that I made. I don’t even have a nephew.
Update: The subway map was made by Erin Jang.
Photographer’s venn
A diagram that shows the overlap of street photography, fine art photography, and photojournalism.
How people spend their time
Great interactive graphic from the Times depicting how people spend their time.
How to get The Sartorialist to shoot you
A handy flowchart: how to get your photo taken by The Sartorialist. If you’re a man and you have pants: “cuff ‘em, roll ‘em, make ‘em too short”.
Salary vs performance in baseball
Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!
Flip Flop Fly Ball
Flip Flop Fly Ball is a marriage of baseball fandom and an enthusiasm for infographics. While not strictly baseball, this comparison of the sizes and shapes of sports balls is a favorite.
Politics of the Supreme Court
A very interesting infographic of the ideological history of the Supreme Court from 1937 to the present. The color coding on the map is weirdly inaccurate but you can still be general trends pretty well…like how many of the justices changed greatly during their terms. William O. Douglas became slightly more moderate mid-term and then got really liberal while Rehnquist went from very conservative to more moderate as his term went on, especially after he became Chief Justice.
OT: I knew there was a Burger on the bench but was unaware of Justice Frankfurter (1938-1961).
Update: Alex Lundry designed the visualization and got in touch to explain the color coding.
The colors are chosen based upon the Min, Max, and Median of the area we are comparing. So, in the first view, the “overall” view, the darkest Red is anchored to the maximum ideology number across all justices and all terms, the darkest Blue is anchored to the minimum score, and the purest white is anchored to the actual median number (The Location of the Median Justice is NOT necessarily the actual median, as it is calculated via a Bayesian statistical estimate).
The second “compare” option, “within each seat, row” calculates separate color anchors for each row.
Similarly, the third compare option, “within each year, column” calculates separate color anchors for each column.
The Location of Median Justice and Court Average are not included in these calculations and their color values are set to what they would be in the overall comparison.
Update: Burger, Frankfurter, Salmon. (via @kurtw)
Nice infographics
Infographics News collects some lovely infographics from a new Portuguese newspaper called i.
The style of infographics follow the general design created by Javier Errea: no fireworks, modern, compact, with cromatic impact but smart. And the Innovation spirit: “newspapers must be daily magazines”, as Juan Antonio Giner says.
(via max gadney)
How to be happy in business
Bud Caddell summarizes how to be happy with your work in the form of a Venn diagram consisting of three main overlapping areas: What We Do Well, What We Want to Do, and What We Can Be Paid to Do. (via today and tomorrow)
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