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.

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!

Free The Vote! (Spanish)

Infographic video from NSM in Santiago de Chile for the Free The Vote Campaign. I don't speak Spanish, so I'm not exactly sure what it says...

Thanks Marco, for broadening my horizons!

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

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

A New President - Wordle

I don't think I've ever posted about Wordle.net. So I thought this word cloud of President Barack Obama's inaugural address yesterday would be a good example.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

The Hidden Cost of War

Found on both Information Aesthetics and Visualizing Econmics.

Map of Newspaper Presidential Endorsements

Staying on the presidential election theme, here's a great infographic on infochimps.org.  Red shows newspapers endorsing McCain, and Blue show newspapers endorsing Obama.  The inner color of each circle also represents which candidate the newspaper endorsed in the 2004 election.  The size of the circle represents each newspapers circulation.

Also notice the mismatch between the newspaper endorsement and each state's "Red vs. Blue" alignment.

Thanks Garrett for the link!

Does Your Vote Matter? YES!

Sticking with the stuff from GOOD magazine, this is one of the GOOD Sheets available for sale as a poster at Starbucks for a limited time.  I've been looking for some good election related graphics.  There are a ton out there, but I'm looking for the gems.

I hear all the time that people don't think their vote matters, and in some cases it may get lost in an election that isn't close or competitive.  However, you never actually know if a race is going to be close or not (unless there is only one candidate).

In some of our local elections, I've seen some decisions put up to vote that won by only 12 votes!

I'm not pushing any specific politcal opinion, just that everyone should get out and vote.  Early voting is already open in many areas, so do your part and be heard!