Thursday, August 30, 2007

What does 16 Million colors look like?


From David Naylor's blog, a color map that includes all 16.8 million RGB colors.

Katrina's Blame Game


Following the Katrina Diaspora graphic, here's another one related to Hurricane Katrina that maps the blame from different key figures and celebrities. I found this on mylifestream.net and originally from nytimes.com in October 2005.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

A Day of Diggs


This one is really interesting. Stamen Design took one day of digg.com and visualized the user activity. The explanation is really cool, and can be found here on content.stamen.com. Stamen works with Digg on a number of the tools available in Digg Labs.

Red dots represent people that have been on Digg for a while, yellow is a good mix, and blue is new users. So when a story is predominantly blue, it represents a story that is attracting a bunch of new users to Digg.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Katrina's Diaspora

Originally from the nytimes.com in October 2005, I found this map graphic on mylifestream.net. This shows the geographic distribution of applications to FEMA for aid from Katrina victims. Presumably, that means the application locations imply where displaced Louisiana residents moved to.

The Price of Piercing


The risks associated with body piercing from the Washington Post in November 2006. The information goes as far as male and female genitalia, but they wisely decided not to include those in the image. Why would you pierce those voluntarily?!?

The image shows obvious placement on the body. The number of squares represents the healing time necessary with the dark color representing the minimum time, and the lighter color showing the potential longer time to heal. I would have also showed the price to have each area pierced, but they neglected to include that.

Who would have thought that a pierced nipple could cause a "breast-feeding impairment"? Let's hope the baby doesn't confuse the nipple ring for a teething ring!

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Bodies in the Solar System


Another great infographic on kokogiak.com showing the relative size of large objects (88 of them, at least over 200 miles in diameter) in our solar system. The largest (of course) being the sun down to the smallest, which is Davida, an asteroid 203 miles in diameter.

Drawing Disney Characters


Silver Bullet Comics has an article for aspiring comic artists, but I found this little gem.

A very simple infographic demonstrating that characters much each have a distinctive shape that makes them recognizable even from a distance. Very similar to the "silhouette test" for good character drawings to be recognizable in silhouette.

E-mail Analysis


Origianally from a NYTimes.com article in 2005, I found reference to this recently on Adam Smith, Esq. (A free registration to NYTimes.com is required to view the full size image)

Some Computer Science professors analyzed one week of e-mail traffic from Enron (about 500,000 emails) in May 2001 looking for patterns that would help investigators narrow down their search. This infographic is the result showing the email connections between employees

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Consumer Spending (5% on Tech Stuff)


From Wired magazine (issue 15.08) a treemap infographic of consumer spending in 2005. 5% of all consumer spending was on technology, and of course, Wired broke down that 5% into an expanded treemap.

Internet access +216%, Residential phone -25%. VOIP seems to be making an impact.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Periodic Table of Visualization


This table is a must-see site for anyone who works creating visualizations. This website from visual-literacy.org has grouped visual methods into six categories (like Concept Visualization and Metaphor Visualization), and made it interactive so when you move your mouse over one of the specific methods it shows you an example.

This is a great resource to help inspire you to visualize your data in new ways. I find that I like trying to visualize the same data in a couple different ways to find out which works best at communicating the data to others. Ironically it's missing the visual method of laying out data into a periodic table!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

How to Spot a Handgun


Found on Edward Tufte's website. Edward posted a small collection of infographics from Megan Jaegerman during her time working for the NY Times. This graphic of Spotting a Hidden Handgun, was updated and revised for Edward's book, Beautiful Evidence.

Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998.
-Edward Tufte, July 2007

Monday, August 13, 2007

World Drinking Map


From drinkingmap.com, this map shows the legal drinking age by country. For the vast majority of the world 18 is the legal age. There are only a few countries like the U.S. that have a drinking age as high as 21.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Starship Dimensions


As a follow-up to my earlier post on the Starship Comparison Poster, the Starship Dimensions website has a much more extensive library of sci-fi ships all shown to scale. There are so many here that the website is broken up into different pages from small scale up to "Big" scale. Click on the tabs across the top to pick a scale (100X, 10X, 1X, etc.).

Fantastic resource. Jeff Russell has done a great job accumulating the images and tracking down their relative sizes.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

XPLANE offers XPLANATIONS


XPLANE is a company whose whole purpose is professional infographics. They do a bunch of infographics for big and small companies, but also do a lot of work for Business 2.0 magazine (a favorite of mine). Check out David's post that Business 2.0 might be in trouble.

A number of infographics (called XPLANATIONS...I love it) are available free for download here.

David Grey is the CEO, and he also runs his own blog called Communication Nation.

Friday, August 10, 2007

World's Most Dangerous Drugs


Another good one from Healthbolt. Color coded by class, and ranked by overall harm to the human body.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

2008 Presidential Campaign Finances


This interactive infographic from the New York Times website is really impressive. Using weekly data reported by the Federal Election Commission, it plots the contributions on a map of the U.S. and sizes the bubbles based on contributions from that city. It has data from every week since January 1st, so it will also "play" and animated version showing the contribution as time progresses (similar to the Trendalyzer that Google purchased from GapMinder).

You can also search for specific contributors to see which candidate campaigns they have contributed to, and how much they gave.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

World Fatness


Another good one from Wellington Grey. Obesity across the world shown visually. The size of the little person's body represents the percentage of people in that country with a body-mass index over 30.

Wow...are we fat or what? Are you going to finish those fries?

Sunday, August 5, 2007

The Coming Water Wars


Another graphic from Jonathan Harris from his time at Princeton with the International Networks Archive. It's a couple years old, but absolutely still relevant. I believe this is from around 2003.

Added: Recently popular on Digg.com

Periodic Table of the Internet


Wellington Grey has created a graphic representing some of the internet's most popular sites in a familiar layout. The Periodic Table of the Internet groups the most popular sites on the web in categories like Search Engines, Aggregators, Operating Systems, Blogs, Social Networking, etc. Each individual block links to its respective site.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Executive Salary Comparison


Portfolio.com has a number of good interactive infographics on their News & Markets/Multimedia page.

This Salary Comparison is simple but hugely informative showing the difference in number and visual representation of size, but also over time as you move the slider on the left. In 2005 the difference between the average worker and the CEO is so large it doesn't fit on the screen anymore. But that is down from 2000 when the difference was the largest at 548x.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Imagining the Tenth Dimension


Ten dimensions are really hard for most people to understand. Especially since our lives are constrained to only four dimensions. This video from tenthdimension.com does an EXCELLENT job of using pretty simple animation and illustrations to explain the 10 dimensions of our universe.

This video is really good, even if you're not a physicist.