Christmas by the Numbers!

BillShrink.com presents this holiday infographic, Christmas by the Numbers, visualizing the decline in holiday spending in the U.S. and some other fascinating holiday figures.  Click the link to see the high-resolution version.

‘Tis the season for Christmas trees, lights and gifts, and in the past that has also meant the season of outrageous spending. While the holidays may not be cheap, hard times sometimes call for desperate measures and drastic budget changes. Here’s a look at the hard facts and numbers of this most wonderful time of the year.

Merry Christmas from Cool Infographics!

Infographic Coins!

What a great infographic product design idea!  From designer Mac Funamizu on his site, PetitInvention, Infographic Coins that use the physical analogy of a pie chart to help consumers figure out the currency, especially when visiting a foreign country.  You have to ignore some of the benefits of all round coins, but the idea is spot-on.  Feeling in your pocket, you could almost always pull out the right coin.

The round shaped coins must have a lot of benefits that other figures such as a triangle or a square don’t. Also, non-rounded coins may have many demerits. Aside from those, travelers and other people who are not accustomed to the currency would be able to easily remember how much each of these coins is (as long as she knows how to read pie charts).

Ebay Visualizes Black Friday 2009 - Interactive infographic map

From ebay, a map of the transaction activity on Black Friday 2009 (the shopping day after Thanksgiving).  1 million transaction are mapped in the U.S. over the course of the day!

Activity Level Indicator The color of the point on the map indicates the number of transactions that occurred in the corresponding area.

Data Execution This transaction map was created as a study of the extensive activity that occurs in the eBay Marketplace on the biggest offline shopping day of the year. It is a visualization of all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions on eBay on Black Friday, November 27, 2009 (12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM EST). Although eBay is an international marketplace, this map is focused on U.S. data, as Black Friday is the traditional beginning of the holiday shopping season for the U.S.

It's an interactive, animated timeline, so you can watch the transactions grow throughout the day and zoom in to specific areas of the country by clicking on the map.  It's a flash animation, but there's a WMV movie file available for download too.

They also did a map of the even bigger 1.4 million transactions on Cyber Monday 2009.

Found on VizWorld

Vote With Your Dollars! - Corporate Political Contributions infographic

Vote With Your Dollars, is a corporate political contributions map.  Using the public data from the Center for Responsive Politics (2004-2008), GoodGuide.com has plotted the balance of contributions from companies.  Mouse-over a specific company logo to see the detailed data (like Dell above).

View the political contributions of your favorite companies and see how you vote with your dollars.  The data is surprising!

You can choose specific companies or business sectors, and then change the sort order.  Here is the retail sector sorted by Most Democratic Leaning:

Thanks Anthony for sending in the link.  Sorry it took so long to get posted.

CEO Compensation Infographic Contest Winner!

In September, GOOD magazine held an infographic contest to illustrate the top CEO compensation packages.  The above infographic by Dee Adams wins the prize!

Dee Adams’s piece “The Top 8 of CEO Compensation” does an excellent job of illustrating the massive salaries of CEOs and relating them to regular employees in a clean and simple manner. It’s our winner, and Adams will take home our prize package, including a GOOD T-shirt, a free subscription, and $250. You’ll be able to see her infographic in print in our next issue as well.

All of the entries are available for viewing here, but I wanted to include a few of my other favorites:


By Robin Richards:

By Jessica Karle:

By Caroline Hadilaksono:

By Amanda Buck:

The Billion Dollar Gram

This is one of those simple, but great infographics.  Once the news starts talking about "billions" of dollars, the brain goes numb and it all runs together because the numbers are too big for us to comprehend.

David McCandless, from Information Is Beautiful, created this tree map to show the relative size of the different billion dollar spending and budgets in the news.

Great job David, keep them coming!

What is the GDP per Capita for Every Country?

Cool interactive chart on Snippets.com that shows the GDP per Capita of every country (so it claims).  It has a number of predefined groupings like Continent, UN Members, OPEC, Communist, Largest Area, etc to show comparisons.

The interactive chart below represents the GDP per capita for each country. Click on any of the buttons to view the data for that particular group of nations. You can highlight a particular country by selecting it in the dropdown box.  The data was compiled from the 2008 CIA World Factbook.

Thanks for the link Jerry!

American health care on (4) napkins

Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin, has posted a napkin explanation of the American Health Care debate on his blog.  It took him 4 napkins to complete his explanation, but I think he did a really good job trying to help people understand a very complex issue.

He has also published a slideshow of the complete series up on SlideShare.net

Check out Dan's great book, Back of the Napkin.

NEW Death and Taxes 2010 poster!!

First, Jess from WallStats.com has released the 2010 Death & Taxes poster.  This is one of the best infographic examples today.  It's extremely informative, and the topic has a very wide reach.  The Death & Taxes poster from 2007 was my initial post on Cool Infographics, so I'm very excited to see this update.   Now the 2010 version is available to purchase as a poster here. Great job Jess!

Second, I'm really impressed by the viewer code for the poster. It's from Zoomorama.com, and lets me embed the interactive viewer.  The built-in zoom is pretty nice, but the Quick Find index on the left side is the best part.

Amazon Acquisitions infographic

Found on meettheboss.com, a decent infographic of the acquisitions that Amazon.com has made over the years.  Drawn like an org chart, I like that each branch represents another year, so it becomes a timeline.

One Trillion Dollars Visualized [infographic video]

New video based on the infographics from our friend, Jess Bachman, from WallStats.com!  Created by/for Mint.com.

Trillion is the new Billion!

Obama's Credit Card Statement

Here's another one I found while I was checking out gimmiethescoop.com. From Tyler Shears, this one visualizes the last six months of Federal Reserve debt as a credit card bill.

The American Dream/Nightmare

I really like this one from gimmiethescoop.com.  It's pretty simple (it's a 3D column chart), but it get's it's point across well.  The accumulated debt for the average American continues to outpace their annual income.  The concept of living beneath your means is foreign to a lot of people.

Found a link on nerdmodo.com

Why are Cheap Airlines so cheap? (infographic)

From 5WGraphics.com, a good side-by-side infographic comparison of why the cheap airlines can actually operate with lower fares to passengers. The cost comparison is in Euros, but those of us in America should be able to figure it out.

How do College Students Spend Money?

 I certainly don't remember having 40% of my budget as "discretionary" when I was in college!


This is from the Westwood College website, but I don't see a specific creator listed.

Visualizing the Stimulus Bill

Here's a great, simple graphic that breaks down the stimulus bill.

Nicholas Rapp does some great infographic design work.  Check out some of his other work at nicolasrapp.com

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Video by Jonathan Jarvis, makes sense of the credit crisis.  HD version is available at http://crisisofcredit.com/. 

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Taking Apart the $819B Stimulus Package

Very detailed infographic from the Washington Post showing how the proposed stimulus package is broken out between ares of spending and tax cuts.

The centerpiece of President Obama's domestic agenda is an $819 billion economic stimulus plan. The Senate will consider the measure this week, with an eye toward the amount of tax cuts and spending. Republicans and Democrats spar over what to consider a tax cut. An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tallies the tax-cut portion to be significantly less than the one-third Democrats claim it to be.

SOURCE: Congressional Budget Office | Reporting by Karen Yourish, graphic by Laura Stanton - The Washington Post - February 01, 2009

The Hidden Cost of War

Found on both Information Aesthetics and Visualizing Econmics.

A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis

This is a tall flow chart helping describe the financial crisis, from blog.mint.com.

Thanks Alwyn!