Chart Chooser

A quick reference guide (in the form of a mind map) by Andrew Abela on choosing the right type of chart for the type of message you are trying to communicate with your data.

Found on Digital Inspiration

NEW Death and Taxes 2009 poster

New Death and Taxes infographic for 2009!  Interactive viewer let's you zoom in to see all of the details.

"Death and Taxes:2009" is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President's budget request for 2009. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster. 

The Death and Taxes poster from 2007 was my initial post on Cool Infographics, so I'm very excited to see this update.  Now the 2009 version is available to purchase as a poster here.

Top 10 UK Brands 2007 Visualisation

Top 10 UK Brands 2007 Visualisation, originally uploaded by visual think map.

Inspired by the infographic "Who Owns the Car Companies" that I originally posted about in October 2007, Chris Watson, from Visualthinkmap.blogspot.com, has created a cool infographic showing the owners for some of the top brands in the UK.

Great job Chris!

Microsoft HealthVault Xplaned

Microsoft enlisted our friends from Xplane to help visualize the theory behind the HealthVault system.

I would almost call this a 3D mind map the way it’s laid out.

Who Owns the Car Companies? (UPDATE)

TooManyCars.com has updated their family tree style poster of how all of the car companies are related. The latest updates were as of 4/1/08. They have also changed to better software used to zoom into the poster. Each of rectangles you see on the images will zoom in close so you can read the details about the connections.

They've really done a good job tracking down the specific types of relationships and the ownership portions between the companies. High-res PNG or PDF files are also available.

Quake Family Tree

From Wikipedia, the Quake Family Tree shows the history of the Quake computer game engine and all of the other games that were built from each version using a mind map.

Found on digg.com

On The Map

Found on notcot.com, On The Map is a cool project by Stefanie Posavec that maps the rhythm and flow of literary works into some stunning visual posters. Breaking a story down into chapters, paragraphs, sentences and finally individual words. Then color coded to capture the topics as they reappear throughout the story. The level of detail is really impressive. Click the images to see the high-resolution images from notcot.com.

Thanks Jonathon and Jason for sending the link.

Stefanie also created a number of additional visualizations of the same story.

The Software Wars

Found originally on Digg Images, this one is hosted on Steven Hilton's website (the author).

I guess you could call this a Mind Map style, but it's more like a Battlefield style infographic. I really like how it shows the products that multiple competitors are challenging Microsoft with and the associated product on the Microsoft side that is being challenged.

Visuwords

Visuwords is a new website that visually shows the relationships between words. More than an online dictionary or thesaurus. The relationships are shown graphically like a mind-map.

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Found on LifeHacker.

Who Owns the Car Companies?

I found three different images showing the complex network of ownership between the automotive companies. Three different attempts at making these complex relationships easier to understand. This first one is a scan from a magazine, but I can't find any reference to which actual magazine it came from. Charted out like a subway map, it's pretty easy to follow.

This next one from Too Many Cars is charted like a family tree, or a mind map. It's the easiest the follow, but probably the least aesthetically pleasing. Online the image is broken into smaller pictures so you can zoom closer, but is also available as a large poster in PNG or PDF formats. The data for this one is from 2006, and is the most current of the three.

This last graphic claims to show the ownership mix in the auto industry as a form of bubble chart, but I can't find any date or source data link. I think the bubble sizes represent something, like size of the company or ownership, but I can't tell. So I can't tell how accurate this is. The image is on Tinypic.