The Foursquare Visualizer

Foursquare has release a new Foursquare Visualizer, that creates an interactive data visualization of your own activity for the last 12 months.  I included the images from my own history.

At Foursquare, we’ve always known how very special our community is. Today, April 16 (4/4^2), marks the fourth annual 4sqDay. Each year, we take this opportunity to thank our amazing community for all that they do.

…take a peek back into your own history at foursquare.com/visualizeme. It’s just our small way of saying, “Thanks! We think you’re awesome.”

There are a handful of different visualizations of your own history of check-ins available.  The connection circle (shown above) is the best looking.  Other visuals include a Timeline and Categories.

Found on the Foursquare blog

Subways of North America

Now this is truly meta.  A subway map visualization of all the Subways of North America from Randall Monroe of xkcd.com.

For the pedantic rail enthusiasts, the definition of a subway used here is, with some caveats, “a network containing high capacity grade-separated passenger rail transit lines which run frequently, serve an urban core, and are underground or elevated for at least part of their downtown route.” For the rest of you, the definition is “an underground train in a city.”

About one in three subways stops in North America are in NYC

Another great design from Randall!

Connecting The Dots

Connecting the Dots is a mind map design from Habitat for Humanity.  It was published in the May 2013 edition of their own magazine, Habitat World, and made available online as a PDF download.

Learn more about how Habitat builds homes, communities and hope.

I really like the combination of the Venn diagram in the center and the mind map nodes that extend outward.  The sizes of the circles doesn’t have any meaning, just sized to fit the text.  This is a really good way for Habitat for Humanity to tell their story with a visual explanation.

The United States of Energy

The United States of Energy from Saxum, is a huge project to map domestic energy sources.  

Finally… After almost 50 years of dependence on foreign sources to meet our growing energy needs, our country is finally in a position to begin reversing the trend. Through advances in drilling technology, discoveries of new oil and natural gas reserves and swift progress in the renewables sector, the United States is setting a course for energy self-sufficiency.

What began as a simple graphic showcasing America’s energy riches quickly grew into a two-sided, folded map concept displaying thousands of individual data points.

The #USofEnergy map visualizes our country’s energy potential by charting current sources of energy production and identifying future resources and known deposits. Energy resources surveyed include: natural gas, oil, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, solar and biomass.

This is actually designed as two landscape posters as the front and back, but when put together, they make one very detailed portrait orientation poster.  I love the main U.S. map that is the primary focus, and the designers took on the challenge to visualize the many different energy sources as represented with the overlapping colors.  You’ll notice that the smaller area coverage shapes are always on top, so the small circles aren’t completely hidden by the larger area shapes.  I would have attempted making the colored areas slightly transparent to let the underlying shapes show through, and removing the text names of all the states might have helped to reduce the visual noise.

My power contract for InfoNewt here in Texas is 100% Wind Power, but I had no idea that Texas is the national leader in wind power production!

I’m not sure what to call them, but I like the paired 180° doughnut charts showing how the sectors and sources of energy have changed from 1949-2011.  However, I don’t like the chart legends that makes them hard for the reader to figure out what each color represents.  Legends are evil!  It would have been nice for the nine types of energy to be shown with icons (along with the color-coding), and the icons or text could have been shown along with the larger 2011 doughnut segments.

The statistics shown at the bottom are shown as just text numbers.  In contrast to all of the data visualizations throughout the rest of the design, this makes these numbers seem unimportant to the reader.

Found on Visual.ly

Alberto Cairo - What Makes an Infographic Cool?

GUEST POST by Alberto Cairo

A ‘cool’ infographic is one that not only forces you to stop and stare at it with awe, but also —and above all— one that gives you insights that you would not get otherwise. ‘Cool’ infographics reveal patterns and trends that lie buried below mountains of data and facts. They make complexity clear without compromising its integrity.

To be truly ‘cool’, an infographic needs to be honest, truthful, deep, and elegant. It can be fun, too, but it needs first to respect the intelligence of its potential readers, and be designed not just to entertain them, but to enlighten them. A bunch of out of context numbers or grossly simplistic charts surrounded by pictograms or illustrations is never a ‘cool’ infographic. Quite the opposite is true. The primary goal of ‘cool’ infographics is not to ‘bring eyeballs’ or ‘go viral’. Those are by-products. If you design with just those objectives in mind, you will end up having not an infographic, but perhaps a colorful but ultimately worthless poster. Any truly ‘cool’ infographic is a tool for rational understanding, an instrument to discuss relevant ideas and phenomena.

As an example, I would like you to visit this very simple but very smart interactive graphic by The Washington Post. See how carefully the information is layered and dosed in it. Notice how it first highlights some important facts (“Drug killings down”, “Most dangerous age…”) and then it lets you explore the data at will. It is beautiful, it is informative, it is useful. And it is extremely cool.

Alberto Cairo teaches infographics and visualization at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He is the author of the book The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (PeachPit Press, 2012). He has been a consultant and instructor with media organizations and educational institutions in more than twenty countries.

LINKS

www.thefunctionalart.com

Twitter: @albertocairo

School of Communication: http://com.miami.edu/ 

White House will be Posting More Infographics

The White House has just started posting on Tumblr, and released the White House on Tumblr infographic you see above to kickoff the blog.  I’m pleased to see infographics as a large section of the content they are planning, but also a little bit worried.

We see some great things here at the White House every day, and sharing that stuff with you is one of the best parts of our jobs. That’s why we’re launching a Tumblr. We’ll post things like the best quotes from President Obama, or video of young scientists visiting the White House for the science fair, or photos of adorable moments with Bo. We’ve got some wonky charts, too. Because to us, those are actually kind of exciting.

They’re not kidding about the “Wonky charts!”  I look at this design and think “Huh?”  The infographic appears to be a stylized form of a coxcomb chart or rose diagram, but not really.  It’s definitely an aesthetic design all about style without substance.  The design is just supposed to imply the different types (and maybe the amounts) of content they intend to publish.  There isn’t any real data or numbers behind the chart, and the hand-drawn aspect reinforces that this is just suggestive of what we should expect to see in the future.  

Visually, I guess it also suggests that the content might cover multiple categories.  So posts about the FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) might include photos, behind-the-scenes information and posts about Bo, the First Dog.

No real chart would have overlapping pie slices.  Slices of a true Rose Diagram (credited to Florence Nightingale) would have equal angles that add up to 360° or 100%, and with varying radii, the area of each slice would represent the value of each section.

The staff at the White House has posted infographics on the official White House blog before (which I critiqued here and here).  I love that this helps raise the awareness and credibility of infographics aas a whole!

Drowning in Big Data [infographic video]

Infographic video from 2011 by The Economist that uses animated data visualizations to tell the story about growing Big Data.

Digital data will flood the planet—and help us understand it better

Found on Visual Loop

New Guest Post Series: What Makes an Infographic Cool?

What Makes an Infographic Cool?

I’m very excited about this project!  This week I’m going to start sharing a weekly guest post series from prominent infographics designers about “What makes an infographic design cool?”  Each Wednesday, I’ll feature a different expert opinion (until I run out of experts).  I’ve invited these experts to draft their own posts, and share whatever examples they want to highlight.

I’ve been running the Cool Infographics site since 2007, and we have watched an amazing category of design being developed.  They didn’t exist when I started, but now we have an infographics design industry, and a number of well known infographics design experts.  The practice of visual storytelling has become a recognized design profession.

I receive around 30-50 infographic submissions to the site every day, and most of them don’t make the cut to be considered a “cool infographic” to be posted.  The process of filtering these designs is very time consuming, and my current backlog is up to at least 400 unread submissions.  Over the years, we have developed our own formula for filtering the infographic designs you see posted on the site, but I really wanted to hear and learn from other experts about what they consider to be “cool.”

Stay tuned, and let me know what you think of the series in the comments.

What Guests Want...at Hotels

Hotels.com has released the 2013 version of their Global Hotel Amenities Survey, summarized in the infographic What Guests Want.  Part of an ongoing series from Hotels.com on their press site, the infographic takes a fun look at what hotel-stayers value most.  Apparently everyone wants free WiFi!

You just checked into your favorite hotel and are ready to enjoy all it has to offer. What kind of amenities inspire you? We surveyed travelers from all over the world to see what perks they valued most when spending a night away from home. 

The infographic is an additional content piece to the release of the complete survey, Global Travelers Want To Stay Connected And Comfy.  The Hotels.com press site is primarily targeted at an audience of hotel industry executives and the news media, and they maintain a dedicated infographics page.  The addition of the infographic to the press release helps to make the often dry survey data more engaging, and additional press releases were also published to highlight some of the hidden gems in the data: Danish Hotel Guests Most Honest; Americans Come In 23rd Place

Designed by Jeremy Yingling with InfoNewt, the infographic is essentially an executive summary of the much larger survey report that Hotels.com publishes each year.

I’ve posted a short, behind-the-scenes Q&A with Hotels.com about their experiences using infographics on the InfoNewt blog.

The Importance of Childhood Education

A helpful infographic for soon-to-be parents. The Importance of Childhood Education infographic from SchoolTutoring Academy takes information about kids with early childhood education and attention and compares them to kids who did not. But it isn’t all bad news for moms, the infographic gives a few tips on how to survive being a stay-at-home mom as well as some positive job information. Then see how the United States matches up with other countries on early childhood education.

While there can be no denying the heavy importance of early education for a child, this education infographic delves much deeper by looking at how future success in life can often be predetermined by the quality of early eduction.

It also explores the often overlooked importance the role the parent plays, especially the Mother. How important is it for Moms to stay at home with their children during early learning? What steps can working Moms take to secure the best educational foundation for their child? All these topics are researched presented in the infographic. The last segment compares the different education paths taken by countries from around the world. From birth to age 7, we look at the different educational institutions that counties from Canada to Germany to Italy to the United States use to start their children’s educations.

If you have any comments or thoughts on the information included in this infographic or education in general, please use our comment section below. You can also see our previous infographic discussing the cost of rising education.

Although the information included in the design is great, this infographic has a lot of text.  Too much text.  That much text in a design will turn away potential readers even before they start.

Thanks to Shell for sending in the link!