Olympic History of World Records

The History of World Records from NYTimes.com shows how the world record in a number of Summer Olympic events has progressively been beaten over the last 100 years.  In this chart, the Men's 100m Freestyle record was beaten three times this year improving the world record by 0.45 seconds.  Similar events are all charted together, so you can see other freestyle events on the same chart.

Olympics Medal Count Map

The Medal Count Map from the NYTimes.com show the total number of medals each country has won in every olympics since 1896.  Choose a year on the timeline to animate the graphic.  Rolling your mouse over a country will show the breakdown of Gold, Silver and Bronze medals and clicking will bring up a complete list of the events and medal winners.

Evolution of Olympic Torches

The group at the NY Times online has been working overtime to create a bunch of infographics as part of their coverage of the 2008 Olympics.  I'm going to highlight them this week with many of the graphics they've created.  Their graphics are coming our rapid-fire just like the events in China.

First up is an Olympic Torch History graphic, highlight the torch designs since 1936 for both the Summar and Winter Olympic Games.   Roll over each torch to see deatils behind the design.

National Debt and the Presidents

First, I'm not pushing any particular political agenda.  There's considerable debate around this chart, so I don't want to start any arguments.  The debate isn't around the validity of the data, but about how it's being presented.  The information is freely available from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Public Debt.



Second, I like that this chart takes a simple bar chart and adds a few more layers of information.  At its root, this is a timeline of the increase in the national debt based on the federal budget by year.  Then layered on top of that are the presidents in office that year, some color coding, the political party controlling the White House and highlights for record years.



Third, just to share the reasons for the debate.  This is a great example of data being visualized with a specific agenda in mind.  Obviously, this is a chart framed to make Republicans look bad, and Democrats look good.  The debate centers around a few issues like programs started by one President will carry into the term of another President and more importantly that the political party controlling Congress actually has more impact on the federal budget than the President does.

BBC World Food Prices

The BBC online has a site dedicated to charting food prices around the world called : The cost of food: Facts and figures.  Mostly simple charts, but they've found a handful of really good information.  They could make these prettier, but they get the message across.  Each chart tells a simple story.

Awesome Medical Visualizations

Really neat promotional video for Hybrid Medical Animation.  These guys do some amazing work.

The Ropes at Disney

Found on CartoonBrew, this circular chart from 1943 shows the development process of an animated film through the different roles within the Disney organization.  Not exactly an org chart, this is more of a process map.

How do they make those drawings move?  This chart, an separate pull-out from the 1943 booklet, The Ropes At Disney’s (see below), explains the whole process.You’ll note that it all starts with “Walt”. And his main focus was “Story” and “Direction”.

Can you tell I'm going to Walt Disney World today?

Visual Baby Name Trends site

NameTrends.net is a fantastic interactive site that charts and maps the popularity of baby names over the last century in the U.S.  You can look at the most popular names, or search for specific names to see their results.  The chart above shows the top 20 baby names from the 2000's decade (10 boys and 10 girls).  You can see that those names also had some popularity at the end of the 19th century.

The site also allows you to map the name popularity by state.  The slider across the top allows you to see the geographic distribution by year.



Found on Information Aesthetics.

The Art of Visual Thinking

Last week, Guy Kawasaki posted a good interview with Dan Roam on his blog.

Do you recognize this picture? It's how Southwest Airlines was pitched.

To provide more insight into the process of visual thinking, I tapped Dan Roam. He is the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures . In this interview he explains why and how to use visual thinking in your business. Click here to read it. To learn even more about visual thinking, be sure to read his book.

Small Gambling Addiction Spending Visual

I love this very simple but powerful visual comparison of the gambling revenues and the money spent on gambling addiction support programs.  The author is only trying to communcate one point, and gets his message across very stongly.  I believe it was done by Tim Broderick, from the Daily Herald.



Found on InfographicsNews.blogspot.com.  Looks like Chiqui Esteban is starting a series of visual comparison graphics over there.