In static data visualizations, you have to always look for a compromise between showing the whole picture and not overwhelming the viewer by overloading the chart with too many details. Luckily, with interactivity on the web, you can surface the most important information while still letting the viewer explore the details. Like in this stock […]
When you get your raw data there’s usually a very straightforward way to visualize it “as is.” Instead of looking at the raw data trying to figure out interesting angles just make the simplest chart (from the data perspective) and let what you see guide your further efforts. Every month I create reports about the […]
Sometimes you create charts to tell some specific story or drive a point home. Like in this chart of the stock market performance during 2016 US Presidential election night taken from this CNN article: Other times you just want to give your viewers a great tool to explore the data and make their own conclusions. […]
Consider this chart from Reuters: Without thinking and analyzing it too much what do you perceive happened to the gun violence after 2005? Did it go up or down? If you look close enough and think about it you’ll realize that the number of murders went up, but most likely it’s not what your initial […]
Every month we give away a dataviz book to one of our newsletter subscribers. Last month it was “Data Visualisation” by Andy Kirk. And it’s traveling to Falk Pietsch from Germany. Congrats, Falk! This month we are giving away a data visualization classic – The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. Just make […]
Donut charts are not that different from Pie charts, except for that hole in the center (hence the name). That hole changes the aesthetics of the chart which you may or may not like, but it can also be used for practical purposes. You can display a total value in the center or use it […]
Pie charts have a bad reputation as slices of a circle are harder for the human brain to compare to each other than, say, bars in a bar chart. Yet, they are a great and widely recognized chart type to show values as part of a whole. Where they really break down, though, is when […]
Occasionally, I use Microsoft’s Power BI to analyze various business data. While I love the tool in general, the map chart part of it frustrates me, to say the least. The problem is that it is using Bing maps as the basis for the map charts which results in charts like this: Not only does […]
As someone responsible for visualizing data, you may lose track of what’s important in the task. Sometimes your goal is to build something visually stunning to impress the public, but most times your goal is to make information easy to understand and analyze. That’s where remembering the KISS principle is very important. In the data […]
The earth is not flat, unlike what some people may think. The maps, on the other hand, are flat. In most cases what you are looking at is a view of the globe that someone created based on some algorithm. These algorithms are called projections and, as it’s impossible to convert a globe to a […]