Coolness Graphed

Coolness Graphed.com has a collection of bar graphs that describes when certain actions are deemed “cool” or “uncool”. The three shown here are just a few examples from the website.

Coolness Graphed.com brings normal events together with a humorous flare by rating them in a “cool”/”uncool” bar graph. The bar graph works well with the events as a visual ranking system. No real values are needed.  Data visualization used brilliantly!  It only takes seconds for the audience to understand each one, and they are highly sharable in social media.

The site has been running for more than two years now, and keeps getting funnier!  Thanks to Jones for sending in the link!

Now also available in a book!

The Vizzies Challenge

A partnership between Popular Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have started a new data visualization contest for 2014 called The Vizzies Challenge.  They are accepting entries up until September 30, 2014.

Here at Popular Science, we’re big fans of visualizations—those often beautiful and always illuminating intersections of science and art. So we’re thrilled to announce a new partnership with the National Science Foundation called The Vizzies.

Do you love animating data, creating science apps, or taking macrophotographs? In the 2014 Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Popular Science, your handiwork can receive its due glory and win you cash prizes.

The Vizzies is the newest iteration of the NSF’s annual International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, which has honored some amazing stuff in the past. They’ve hosted the contest for more than a decade, and this year we’ve joined forces with them so that you, dear reader, will have the opportunity to enter. Macrophotography, animations, data visualizations, even science games—we want them all! A panel of experts will judge the entries, and the winners in each of five categories will be featured in the pages of Popular Science (oh, and you’ll also get cash).

Visualization Challenge participants can submit their entries in one or more of five categories: Photography, Video, Illustration, Posters & Graphics and Games & Apps. The Experts’ Choice winner in each category will be awarded $2,500, and a People’s Choice prize of $1,000 goes to the best overall entry.

If you are designing data visualzations or using visuals to communicate any scientific research, they want you to enter your designs into the challenge.  The visuals can be videos, photos, games, apps or graphics.

Thanks to Earl Humphrey for posting about the challenge in the Visual Thinking group on Linkedin!

HelpMeViz: DataViz Community Feedback for Your Charts

Have you ever struggled with which type of chart to use in your presentation? Or how to get Excel to display the chart the way you want it to appear?  Or don’t know what software will create the data visualization you would like to use?

Jon Schwabish is a data visualization specialist, and in 2013 he launched a new website to help everyone become better at data visualization called HelpMeViz.  The HelpMeViz site invites you to submit your data visualization projects to get feedback from the community.  The community is encouraged to offer suggestions, critiques and debate ideas about chart formats, software tricks, visual applications and visualization methods that can be valuable feedback to make your data more understandable and impactful.

The data visualization community consists of people who use data and design to tackle a variety of issues and challenges. Outside of a few specific blogs and tutorials however, there isn’t a place where that community can provide in-depth comments and criticism on data visualization projects. This site is designed to facilitate discussion, debate, and collaboration from the data visualization community.

The site is open to anyone who is searching for feedback on their visualization designs, from seasoned designers and data visualization specialists to individual analysts searching to improve their graphic displays. All types of visualizations are welcome: simple, single line or bar charts to full-blown infographics to interactive visualizations.

If you have a chart that just isn’t working, or getting your message across to your audience, you can upload it to the site, and get really useful, actionable advice from the Community.

Jon is currently the Senior Researcher and Data Visualization Expert at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and he took some time to answer a few interview questions from me about the HelpMeViz site:

Cool Infographics: Who is the target audience of the site?

Jon Schwabish: The site was created for anyone—truly anyone—to seek feedback or submit comments. I want anyone to be able to use the site—from the data visualization expert to the experienced JavaScript programmer to the research assistant using Excel. To attract that broad audience, I decided against using established tools or sites like Flickr, Pinterest, Behance, or Dribbble. Many of those sites require users to create an account, or have some other barrier to easy entry and I wanted to avoid those types of barriers. Additionally, I felt that sites like Stack Overflow and GitHub appeared too difficult for the everyday user. So, although it’s often said that you should refine your audience, I wanted to go broad here to make it as accessible as possible.

Cool Infographics: How often do people post new visualization questions to HelpMeViz.com?

Jon Schwabish: To date, I’ve posted at least one visualization per week. There have been a few weeks when I’ve been able to do more. Interactive visualizations and ones that have a unique design question—for example, how to create something in Excel—generate the most interest.

Cool Infographics: Are you having success getting the audience to engage and recommend design ideas?

Jon Schwabish: For the most part, I haven’t had to engage the audience much on my own; community members have taken most of the initiative to engage with the content, making light work for me on that end. I’d like to see more requests on the design side—questions about font or color or layout. To date, requests have been primarily about tools and creation of the visualization. But I think a lot of people would benefit from asking basic design-style questions.

Cool Infographics: Does it take much of your own time to participate and keep the site running?

Jon Schwabish: It doesn’t take too much of my own time, but that will change, I hope, as the amount of content increases. I oftentimes have to rewrite the text to clarify the challenge or goal. Sometimes I need to tweak an image or extract an image from a larger document. I rarely fiddle with the data—if the person who submitted the visualization could use it to create the graphic, then it’s probably close enough for others to use. I’ll usually correspond with the submitter once or twice to make sure he or she is okay with my edits and then I post the submission.

Cool Infographics: What are the best examples of successful projects posted to the site?

Jon Schwabish: There have been a number of interesting challenges.

• One was sort of built around the idea of a bullet chart
• Not surprisingly, a triplet of pie charts
• Finally, there was a great discussionJon Peltier to write a separate Excel tutorial on his own site and Joe Mako

Perhaps the thing I’m most excited about for the site right now is the live Hackathon that will be held on Saturday, June 28, with Bread for the World Institute. We are inviting 25 coders, designers, and data scientists to help the Institute with two data visualization challenges. I will be live blogging the event and will make the data available on the HelpMeViz site so that anyone around the world can join the discussion and provide his or her own visualization suggestions.

This site is truly made for everyone, and I encourage you to check it out.  The feedback can range from Excel charting tips to visualization programming code.  You can upload your own charting challenges, offer recommendations on other people’s charts or just lurk and learn from the advice of other experts.

If you’re in the DC area, be sure to check out the HelpMeViz Hackathon event on Saturday, June 28th! HelpMeViz will bring together coders, data scientists, and data visualizers in Washington, DC, to help Bread for the World Institute with two data visualization challenges for its 2015 Hunger Report, which focuses on why women’s empowerment is essential to ending global hunger.

Thanks to Jon for creating this incredible resource, and taking the time to answer a few questions!

Comics That Ask "What If?"

Randall Monroe, author of my favorite web comic XKCD, gave a great TEDTalk about answering science and math questions with his comics.  One of the best parts of this video, and the web comic series in general, is that he uses hand-drawn data visualizations and illustrations to answer them, which makes them easier to understand.

Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions (“what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?”) using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader’s question about Google’s data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer — in which, shhh, you might actually learn something.

Pre-order or watch for his new book, “What If?” to be released in September 2014!

Every Job In America

Every Job In America is a treemap data visualization design from Quoctrung Bui at NPR based on the data that the U.S. government collects for the monthly Jobs Report.  I think I probably fit somewhere in the Services-Professional and Technical Services-Specialized Design section.

Whatever Friday’s monthly jobs report says, it won’t change the big picture. There are roughly 137 million jobs in this country. About two-thirds of those jobs are in private-sector services; the remaining third are split between goods-producing jobs (mainly manufacturing and construction) and government work (mostly at the state and local level).

Here’s a closer look, drawn from the same data that the government collects for the monthly jobs report.

Notes: 

*The data come from the government’s non-farm payroll report — which, as the name suggests, does not include farm jobs. Update: The report also excludes military personnel, government intelligence employees and some self-employed workers.

There isn’t much I would change about this design.  The treemap visualization is well done, and carefully organized to allow for the color coding rectangles.  Titles are missing from any rectangle that was too small to hold the text, but a smaller font could have been used, or a reference to a list at the bottom.

Even though this is part of an article posting, the infographic image itself has a title for easy sharing without the rest of the article.  Including a few other elements in the image file like the data sources and the URL to the landing page would be very helpful.

This is the type of project where I think a link to a public spreadsheet with the numbers used would be helpful.  The article links to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics press releases, but then someone would have to dig through the reports.

The Power of ACC Basketball

The Basketball Staff at CBS Sports has put together a handful of really good data visualizations showing the 29-year history of the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded to 64 teams.  The chart above shows Most Wins won in the Tournament by conference, color-coded by round.  These aren’t complicated designs, but the story they tell is very powerful.

Go N.C. State Wolfpack!  Fantastic win over Xavier tonight!  The Big East looks pretty strong too, but there’s nothing like ACC Basketball.  These data visualizations tell that story much better than text and numbers.  In Texas (Big 12), they just don’t seem to understand the importance of basketball.  Football is what you play in the off-season!  They have it reversed here in Texas, where football is much more important.

Here is that same data shown as a color-coded table that spells out the Most Tournament Wins by Year by year.  This looks like it could have been designed with Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Excel, but it’s done very well.  The simple color-coding adds context and makes the entire table easier to understand.

As an infographics design, the PNG image file itself should include a little more information, in case it gets shared online without the rest of the article (like this blog post).  It should list CBS Sports as the publisher/designer and the URL back to the original article.  I also would have used the conference logos along the y-axis instead of text.

Here’s their chart of overall NCAA Championship Wins over that same 29 year period.

The State of Infographics at SxSW 2014

I post all types of infographics and data visualizations from designers all over the world here on Cool Infographics, and as a recap, I wanted to take stock of the state of infographics and data visualization at this year’s SxSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX.

I’ve been going to SxSW for a few years now, and infographics have been a growing presence in the Interactive portion of the conference every year.  You can find hidden sessions about data visualization, visual communication and infographics in different portions of the conference like the new SXsports, Health and Business sessions.

Check the links and search the presentation hashtags on Twitter to find more information and audience comments from each event.  I know I didn’t catch everything, so send me links to anything (Events, notes, slides, etc) I missed through the Contact page or the comments and I’ll add appropriate ones into the post!

*Sessions I was able to attend

Official Events:

• The Onions of Interactive Infographic Design (#adobesxsw)
  • Sarah Hunt, Product Manager, Adobe Systems @sarahwhatsup
  • This session covered the value of creating animated, interactive infographics with HTML your readers care about using Adobe Edge Animate.
  • Presentation online: http://sarahjustine.com/sneakyfolder/pres
• Sports Don’t Look the Same Anymore* (#sportsviz)
  • John Meyer, Founder, Statographics and CEO, Lemonly @johntmeyer
  • Meyer examined how infographics, data visualizations, and interactive pieces have changed the landscape for scouts, managers and marketers inside of the game, as well as fans and fantasy players outside the game.
  • Slides available online at bit.ly/sportsviz
  • 
• Truth Will Set You Free but Data Will Piss You Off* (#dataethics)
  • Grace Rodriguez, Founder/President, C2 Create @gracerodriguez
  • Jake Porway, Executive Director, DataKind @jakeporway @DataKind
  • Jonathan Schwabish, Government Economist, PolicyViz @jschwabish
  • Kim Rees, Co-Founder, Periscopic @krees @Periscopic
  • This session explored the issues and ethics around data visualization—a subject of recent debate in the data visualization community—and suggest how we can use data in tandem with social responsibility.
  • Storify notes: http://storify.com/gracerodriguez/sxsw-panel-the-truth-may-set-you-free-but-data-wil
• The Most Influential Visualizations of All Time (#5vizzes)
  • Andy Cotgreave, Social Content Mgr, Tableau Software @acotgreave
  • We’ve chosen the 5 most influential visualizations of all time. Each of the charts in this list instigated change: one helped eradicate cholera, another revolutionized nursing.
  • Presentation slides: http://www.slideshare.net/TableauSoftware/the-most-influential-vizzes-of-all-time-sxsw
  • Andy’s summary blog post: http://gravyanecdote.com/uncategorized/sxsw-the-most-influential-visualisations-of-all-time/
  • 
    
• Actively Participating in the Big Data Revolution (#DataRev)
  • Elissa Fink, CMO, Tableau Software @elissafink
  • In this talk, Elissa will share their stories and offer insights into how we can all become more data-driven, every day
  • HighOnData Dashboard: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/highondata
  • 
    
• The Tyranny of Edward Tufte* (#tuftyranny)
  • Gabriel Schaffzin, Researcher & Designer & Builder, Skeptic @gabischaffzin
  • When Edward Tufte tweets mockingly of the leaked NSA slides, he does so as the self-anointed king of presenting evidence. Empiricism’s head cheerleader, he has built an empire on telling everyone—lowly marketer to NASA bigwig—what Truth looks like.  And we eat it up. 
  • Presentation slides: http://utopia-dystopia.com/blog/2014/3/8/sxsw-interactive-2014-austin-tx
• Scientist to Storyteller: How to Narrate Data (#Sci2Story)
  • Eric Swayne, Prod Mgr/Analytics Dir, BuzzShift @eswayne
  • Storify: http://storify.com/40deuce/scientist-to-storyteller-how-to-narrate-data-sci2s
  • Prezi presentation: https://prezi.com/xkqdi1lq8iix/scientist-to-storyteller-how-to-narrate-your-data/
  • 
    
• Visually Turning Complexity into Clarity* (#clarity)
  • Fernanda Viégas, Research Scientist, Google @viegasf
  • Graham Roberts, Graphics/Multimedia Editor, The New York Times @Grahaphics
  • Karl Gude, Graphics Editor in Residence, School of Journalism at Michigan State University @karlgude
  • Ronnie Lipton, Info Design Author, Trainer, Consult @ronnielipton
  • We are a unique gathering of professional visual communicators who employ a wide variety of storytelling platforms (print, interactive and motion graphics) and visual tools (maps, graphs, diagrams, video, etc.) to do our jobs. We will explain our process for finding visual stories in the data, discuss the best technologies for doing what we do and illustrate how we build, plan and execute graphics.
  • Wind Maps: http://hint.fm/wind/ 
  • Sketchnotes: https://twitter.com/KKellyMSU/status/443484058043944960/photo/1
  • 
    
• Show & Tell: How to Present, Extraordinarily (#ShowTell)
  • Dan Roam, President, Digital Roam Inc @dan_roam
  • There are 3 simple rules for making an extraordinary presentation: 
    1. Tell the truth 
    2. Tell it with a story 
    3. Tell the story with pictures
  • 
    
• Mentor Session: Brian Wallace (#infographs)
  • Brian Wallace @nowsourcing is the founder of NowSourcing, Inc., a infographic design and social media agency since 2005 serving everyone from startups to the Fortune 500 and everything in between.
• Workshop: Pimp Your Pitch: Learn Visual Storytelling (#pitchfix)
  • Nancy Duarte, Principal, Duarte @nancyduarte
  • Paul Brown, VP, Duarte @Duarte
  • Mike Pacchione, Facilitator, Duarte @mpacc
  • Ryan Orcutt, Assoc Creative Dir, Duarte 
  • This Visual Storytelling workshop will teach you how to create audience empathy, address resistance, heighten emotional appeal, and strengthen your story structure to persuade your audience.
• Book Signing, Randy Krum, Cool Infographics* - that’s me! (#coolinfobook)
  • Randy Krum @rtkrum @Coolinfographic appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design”
  • 
• Book Signing, Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise (#ESPNbrand)
  • Nate Silver @NateSilver538 appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t”
• Book Signing, Dan Roam, Show & Tell (#ShowTell)
  • Dan Roam @dan_roam appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “The Back of the Napkin” and his new book launched at SxSW this year “Show & Tell!”
• Book Signing, Nancy Duarte, Resonate* (#pitchfix)
  • Nancy Duarte @nancyduarte appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences”.
• The SxSW Trade Show Floor
  • I found three trade show booths this year related to infographics:
  • Tableau Software booth 
  • Visual.ly booth* 
    • 
  • Now Sourcing booth* 
    • 
• Graphic Recordings of SxSW Interactive Events
  • ImageThink @ImageThink created a bunch of LIVE graphic recordings from prominent sessions and made them available for everyone to see across from Ballroom A in the Austin Convention Center and online.
  • Full SxSW gallery online: http://imagethink.smugmug.com/Conferences/2014/SXSWi-2014/37565133_dFJ2tf
  • http://sxsw.com/interactive/news/2014/graphic-recordings-2014-sxsw-interactive-content-march-15-update
  •  

Unofficial Sessions:

• The Attention Economy with Walter, book signing by Ekaterina Walter @Ekaterina, co-author of The Power of Visual Storytelling
  • “Attention is the new commodity. Visual storytelling is the new currency,” say co-authors Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio in their new book The Power of Visual Storytelling.  The first 100 attendees for Ekaterina’s signing will get a copy of her book. Come chat with Ekaterina about the visualization revolution and her thoughts about SxSW Interactive 2014.
  • Hosted by Vocus @Vocus
  • http://www.eventbrite.com/e/wtf-sxsw-visualize-a-powerful-future-tickets-10822280733
• FH Black Box lounge at the Four Seasons (#FHBlackBox)
  • Fleishman Hillard @Fleishman hosted the Black Box Lounge throughout SxSW Interactive with a massive Social Media Control Center that was visualizing millions of data points and mentions online about SxSW.
  • http://fleishmanhillard.com/
  • 
• Column Five announced the release of Visage
  • Column Five @columnfive announced their new interactive data visualization tool, Visage at SxSW.
  • “Visage is a new Web-based platform that transforms the uninspired data in your reports into beautiful, branded visualizations that make your message more impactful—and make your work look good. The easy-to-use software helps you create high-quality, professional visualizations that are accurate, effective and elegant.”
  • http://www.columnfivemedia.com/blog/introducing-visage-our-new-visualization-platform
  • 
• Cool Infographics Meetup
  • Special thanks to the team at the Fleishman Hillard Black Box Lounge!  They allowed me to host the Cool Infographics @Coolinfographic meetup event after my book signing on Monday for anyone that wanted to hang out.  It was also an opportunity to meet fans and sign books for people that didn’t have official SxSW badges.
  • 

Please help add anything I missed by posting in the comments below or sending me a note through the Contact page.  I’ll add new content into the post above.

Update on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 at 9:51AM by Randy

A modified version of this post was featured on The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randy-krum/infographics-at-sxsw_b_5001070.html

The Beautiful Flow of Pi

Flow Of Life Flow Of Pi.  Cristian Ilies Vasile designed this visualization of the first 1,000 digits of the mathematical constant pi using Circos to plot the sequence of digits…in a circular pattern of course!.  You can buy a print copy of the poster for $22 from Fine Art America.  Cristian has create a few different varieties of the artwork that you can see on his page.

Starting with the first digit “3”, a connecting arc is drawn to each subsequent digit (3.14159265358979323846…).  Since the sequence is theorized to be a random sequence, it creates a beautiful visualization that appears evenly distributed among the digits.  Check out this explanation by Martin Krzywinski along with some of his own artwork.  He demostrates the sequence with this visualization of just the first five digits 3.14159…

I had not heard of Circos before, so I have now added a link to it on the Cool Infographics Tools page.

Thanks to Matt Baker for posting on Google+

2013 Airline Scorecard Best to Worst

Traveling by airplane can be a stressful situation. Choosing the correct airline can make all the difference. Check out how your favorite airline scores on the 2013 Airline Scorecard; Ranking of Major Carriers in Key Operational Areas, Best to Worst infographic and article from The Wall Street Journal. 

In the Middle Seat’s annual scorecard of airline service, tracking seven different key measures of airline performance, Alaska Airlines performed best in 2013 among major carriers. At the top with Alaska was Delta, which for the past two years has posted far better operational results than big competitors. Worst among big airlines? United Airlines and American Airlines, again. 

By assigning each airline a specific color, it allows the viewer to clearly distinguish each airline throughout the scorecard. The lines connecting the columns also gives the whole graphic a sense of connectivity and flow, causing the eye to follow each airline.

Even though this visualization is part of a larger article, they did a good job of including the relevant information in the image file itself.  This is a big help when the scorecard image gets shared online.  It has a clear title, data sources and credit to the WSJ.  The URL back to the article would be very helpful, but they didn’t include that in the image.

Found on http://ilovecharts.tumblr.com

Famous Movie Quotes as Charts - the Poster

Dr. Nathan Yau, PhD from FlowingData.com has charted the 100 most memorable quotes from American movies, as selected by the American Film Institute, into a data visualization series called Famous Movie Quotes as Charts.  He had designed the first handful of them a few years ago, but only recently got back into the project and completed all 100.  

These have now been compiled into a beautiful 24”x36” poster available for a limited time before the one-and-ONLY print run for $19.00.  Pre-order your copy this week here!

This 24” by 36” poster is printed on 80lb cover with a matte finish, each signed and hand-numbered.

There’s only going to be one printing, so take advantage of the special pre-order price while it lasts.

Shipping February 2014.

Each chart is a clear visualization of the movie quote, and easy for the audience to understand.  They are beautiful in their simplicity and can be very funny in their interpretation.

Here’s a link to the big version for all of the detail.