All posts from Information Is Beautiful

Every single Dr Who journey ever. Crowdsourced ultra-geek dataset for The Guardian.

Three firms own 89% of your sugar water.
(Hmmm, this needs a bit of design IMHO. I might have a chop at it)
Research and visualisation by Dr Phil Howard of Michigan State University. He’s done some other, great visual explorations of key industries including organic food and seeds.

Articles of War
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
data: http://bit.ly/WikiLame

Research & design: David McCandless
Additional research: James Key
Additional design: Matt Hancock, Joe Swainson

This week, I was lucky enough to accompany UK Prime Minister’s delegation to India as part of contingent of ‘hackers’ and civic-minded dataheads. We did a hack day with some of India’s leading developers and visualizers.
Check out their great, ingenious work in this post for The Guardian.

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.
He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.

The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009. The latest version of our fabled treemap of billion dollar amounts.
All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar
A little context
This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.
So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.
(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)

Design: David McCandless
Research: David McCandless, Matthew Sawh, Caroline Flyn, James Key
Sources: NYTimes, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and other media reports.
Data: http://bit.ly/bndollar

Design duo Tyler Lang and Elsa Chaves are Always With Honor, an East Coast design team with a specialty in beautifully simple information displays and iconography.
I first got turned on to / by their work when I spotted this awesome poster. It visualizes the many domains within design. Somewhat awesomely.

(Here’s a link to a massive hi-res version)
Simple Is Beautiful
Simple shapes, simple typography, simple colour characterises their work. I snaffled them up for a spread in Information Is Beautiful about the various creation stories across cultures – scientific and mythological.

Struck me there was something cool about trying to visualize such an unimaginably complex process with super-simple graphics.
Iconographtastic
Always With Honor create the best icons! You may have seen some of their work for publications like Monocole. So characterful. More here.

Infographtastic
They also had a strong influence on the look and feel of Good Magazine’s infographic Transparency section. Soft lines and cutsy icons make the data seem less harsh, less griddy. I like!

Colours In Culture
My favourite piece, somewhat selfishly, is the Colours In Culture image on the cover of Information Is Beautiful. It visualizes the meaning of colours across different cultures (Native American, Western, Chinese etc).

Bag yourself a poster
In fact, we’ve just litho-printed a gorgeous poster version of this image on 220 gsm, FSC-certified art paper.
The coolest thing though is that it’s a 6-colour process print. Gold and silver on the diagram have been printed – at great expense – in gold and silver ink. Not only does that look cool. But it also means we’ve been able to remove the legend from the design. Making the image even cleaner and simpler.
Order a copy from our store now.
The first print run is already almost sold out. We have just 25 copies left.
Visit AlwaysWithHonor.com for more beautiful work.

SOME LINKS FOR THEE
:: Always With Honor
:: Tyler Lang’s personal site
:: Order a Colours & Cultures poster

“Live-vizzing” a graphic on the UK government’s emergency budget for The Guardian and Open Knowledge Foundation.

So much great work out there at the moment, I wanted to share it with y’all.
Secret Fermy Magazine
Russian infography seems to be on the rise. Here are some great visuals from a publication apparently called ‘Secret Firmy Magazine“. No idea what it’s about. But my eyes just don’t seem to care.

Images from: Timur Shabaev and BogusFreak.co.uk


Damn Tourists!
Twinned with the Touristy Map Of The World is this amazing set of visualisations from Eric Fisher detailing concentrations of tourists in cities around the world, using geotagged photos. Blue are photos taken by locals. Red by tourists. Gorgeous concept and look. [via Burrito Justice]

If Crime Was Elevation
The peaks of San Francisco. Great concept converting crime figures into topology from coder Doug Mccune. Thanks to @calflyn.

How Much CO2??
Here’s a little interactive thing we did for GE’s EcoImagination initiative. A little window landscaping the relationship between driving and CO2 in America.

quickies

Depth Charge – Not loving all the design elements but I scrolled right down to the end
Visual Medical Records – Nice early idea
Meet iPad’s competition – Another great viz from SectionDesign
Marca World Cup Schedule – About a quillion people have sent me this.
(Thanks Nuno Monteiro, Tom Broughton, Richard Stewart, Feisal, Onur Yirmibesolglu etc)

As ever, if you’ve spotted any goodies, send them over. Thanks! David.

Depressing update of our original DeepWater Horizon image.
The oil spill is now on track to be the 3rd worst in history, depositing the equivalent of 22,000 cars worth of oil into the sea every day.
BTW the NYTimes have done a much better interactive graphic.
More info and our data in this online spreadsheet: http://www.bit.ly/InDeepWater

DESIGN: David McCandless
RESEARCH: David McCandless, James Key, Pearl Doughty-White
ADDITIONAL DESIGN: Joe Swainson
SOURCES: International Energy Association, CIA Factbook, International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation Limited, Press Reports
DATA: Explore in this Google doc

The Taxonomy Of The Apple iPhone.
A very smart and good-looking analysis of the infrastructure that supports the existence of the iPhone from Ben Millen. Both from a physical point of view and a Heideggerian perspective, in the context of culture and society.
(Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Excellent.)
You can zoom on the two images here and here.
(Having to zoom into these images is annoying. Visualizations don’t always work that well on screen. They’re usually much better in print. Someone ought to create a sumptuous, colourful coffee-table book of these things, I think).

Great places-to-avoid heatmap using distribution of photos on Panoramio. Nice idea! By BlueMoon.ee