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Recently, CNET featured a video on Aaron Koblin whose name I had never heard before a few viral videos hit.  Aaron is an artist/designer/researcher focused on creating and visualizing human systems.  Many of Aaron’s visualizations are just stunning as you can see in the image above.  One of his most well-known works is the flight pattern simulation shown in the video below.  I have also included some other popular videos regarding Aaron.  Enjoy!

Flight Pattern Video

Sheep Video

Ten Thousand Cents

Radio Head - House of Cards

Check out the video on CNET by clicking on the image below.

To see Aaron’s portfolio, click here.

Instead of calling them pie charts, we’ll just call them donut (doughnut) charts and make them magically delicious.  Wrong.  These two charts, which appeared in the July 14th issue of BusinessWeek, are some of the worst charts I’ve seen in a while.  Note: in the print version, the legend doesn’t cover up the actual chart.  I’m not sure why this wasn’t fixed in the online graphic. 

There have been many articles and blog posts written on the ineffectiveness of pie charts, so I won’t belabor the point more.  For more information about why pie charts (donut charts with the center filled in) are not a good data visualization option, see the links below.  There’s no point in saying the same thing in a different way.  The timing of this post is good being that Seth Godin recently created a lot of stir about bar charts, which led to more pie chart discussions.

Related books:

Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi B. Robbins

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few

Related links on discussion of Bar and Pie charts:

DSA Insights

Jon Peltier

Peltier Technical Services

Jorge Camoes - Charts

Juice Analytics Original

Juice Analytics

Stephen Few

Edward Tufte

Junk Charts

Note: the first pie chart is credited to William Playfair roughly 200 years ago.

The graphic above is a pretty good example of an effective dashboard in my humble opinion.  It doesn’t use a lot of space, yet shows an abundance of data to compare the companies.  Also, notice the sector segmentation using color and columns.  Great job BusinessWeek!

Can you tell me what’s missing with the graphic above?  It has to be the analyst in me, but the first thing I noticed is what’s wasn’t there in this graphic.  Click here to get the answer!

Here is the key to the boxes above. 

This graphic above is another great example of a dashboard type display showing sales and R&D.  I would have thought that Apple spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than just 3.3%.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Below is a line graph showing how the top companies performed compared to the S&P Global and S&P 500 index.  I prefer no legends and adding the description to each line.

With gasoline prices increasing so much lately, I have noticed a dramatic increase in the data/info visualizations related to them.  Here are some that I hope you will find useful.  The first two charts below were found at Gasbuddy and show the average price of gasoline mashed up in a map similar to Google maps.  The second map shows the gas stations and gas prices local to Support Analytics in Columbia, MD.  If I was impacted more from the increase in gas prices, I might use this to shop around for the lowest price per gallon.  Being that I drive about a mile a day and my wife has a government issued vehicle, it wouldn’t affect me unless gas prices were $100 per gallon, which isn’t likely.

Source: www.gasbuddy.com

Source: www.gasbuddy.com

Here is a visual of what makes up the price for gas in 2004, when the average price was $1.85 per gallon versus 2008 where we are now paying roughly $4.03 per gallon on average.  Looking back at the first chart above, you can see how your state/city compares to other states and the national average.  If you live in California or the left coast, I hope you own a Prius.  One fact that I would have expected to see below is a dramatic increase in the distribution cost of gas between 2004 and 2008, which actually decreased.  Seems like there should be an almost perfect correlation between distribution costs and the price of gas, right?  Maybe the impact is hidden due to the category being both distribution and marketing.

Source: www.thebiblog.com

Below are three charts which originated in the NY Times.  The map shows the average price of gas per gallon in a format that I think is much better than the Gasbuddy one above.  Again, if you live in California, I really feel for you.  In the second graphic below, there is a nice timeline dating back to 1920 and going through 2007.  The third line graph highlights the last 18 years of the second chart.  They also do a nice job of highlighting the significant events along the line graph.

Source: www.nytimes.com and viewed at www.flowingdata.com

The last section contains a few graphics that I found in BusinessWeek.  I’ve said before that I do not like pie charts unless you really just want to show how two parts make up the whole.  Even still, a bar chart would take up less space.  The data in the pie refers to a survey asking, does the increase in gas prices have an impact on travel plans of those who are planning a trip by automobile?  Maybe a better question would have been, does the increase in gas prices impact you putting off a vacation or not traveling at all.  I think the results would be much different.

Source: www.businessweek.com

This graphic, which I really like, shows the increase in round trip cost by car and by SUV for various city-to-city travel.  Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s the total cost because it’s only the incremental difference.

Source: www.businessweek.com

The next bar chart highlights that the overall cost of traveling has increased by 5.1% over the past five years (bar in black).

Average annual percentage increase in prices since 2003:

Source: www.businessweek.com

This last column chart illustrate the percentage change in gasoline consumption from the previous year.  We are down quite a bit from this time last year; a 4% swing, as you might expect.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Do you have any gasoline related charts, graphs or visualizations to share?

This video is a good view for a lazy weekend!  Mixed into the video are some good data/info visualizations with a significant shock factor.  Enjoy and thanks Chris Jordan!

A visualization of thousands of Wikipedia edits that were made by a single software bot. Each color corresponds to a different page.
Image: Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kate Hollenbach Source: www.wired.com

Besides being a pretty [colorful] picture, I’m not sure this visualization is useful at all.  I understand the need to visualize terabytes of data because a human being can only comprehend so much.  Can someone please tell me how this visualization is useful in its current state.  There wasn’t a reference to what the colors actually represent in terms of pages.

If you relax your eyes and stare at the center, you will actually see the hidden picture (stereogram).

Wondering what we listen to hear at Support Analytics?  With the help of Wordle, you can now visualize our iTunes music library.  Some of the big artists jump right out at you - U2, Dave Matthews, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Coldplay, PearlJam, Aerosmith, and LinkinPark to name a few.  One big limitation is the size of the small, less prominent, artists.  They are pretty much unreadable.  But, that may just be the point.

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends”.  Source: www.wordle.net

Business Application:

I think word clouds would be awesome for brainstorming?  Think about this: Have someone on your team record all of the ideas of team members separately and use Wordle to visualize which ideas were the most prominent.  They would jump right out at you using this technology and an unbiased method of collecting.

A special thanks goes to Angela who told me about Wordle.

Here are some other variations of our iTunes library with different layouts, colors and fonts using Wordle.  Their customization is excellent.

A special thank you goes to Lou Spirito, Graphics Director at the Baltimore Sun for providing the graphs below and some valuable insight.

Recently, I wrote a blog post about the homicide rate in Baltimore and included the second graph below, which can be found here.

Lou was gracious enough to share with me that the original graph that was designed for the article was the second one below, which is a bar chart overlaid with two series. Then, the chart was redesigned to be the line chart shown below. Prior to the release, it was then reverted back to the originally designed bar chart. I have said before that I prefer line charts to stacked bar charts, but this may be an exception. Here is a quote from Lou that explains part of the design choice.

“I agree with your observation that in this particular case the bars are superior to the line chart for the simple reason that the relationship of the “annual” and “first quarter” data remains unified — this relationship gets lost to some degree in the line chart.” [Lou Spirito]

Because the two series have a significant scale variance, it is helpful to use the bar chart where you can add the values to the smaller series that has less variance between the years than the second series. Adding values to the line chart would make it unreadable.

Granted, both would work well and serve the purpose, but I really like the bar chart with the two overlaid series. Also, the use of color is clean, neat and effective without being gaudy. I may have changed the labels on the x-axis to be every five or ten years, but otherwise it is well designed.

Content is king and sometimes that means going unconventional. See Lou’s comment below.

“We take great care to design graphics with content driving the way. Sometimes it means breaking standard convention at the risk of fielding criticism…” [Lou Spirito]

Intermediate design before reverting back to the original:

Original and Final Design:

Which one do you think is more effective and why?

During the months of April and May 2008, BonaVista Systems is running an Excel Dashboard competition. I have said before that their MicroCharts product is exceptional for dashboard design and improving presentations or Excel analytics. The new version (3) has a lot of great new features, which can be found here.

MicroCharts is the first software, to my knowledge, that has a solution for creating Sparklines in Excel without having to finagle using the old camera feature. MicroCharts is easy to use and truly a great product. For under $200, you can get this add-on for Excel. You can download MicroCharts and try it for free for 30 days.

For the last few days, I have seen many of the blogs that I read promote this competition. I have been hesitant to follow suit because of redundancy, but also believe that it would be a shame for my readers to miss out on this event.

Winners of the competition will receive:

• 1st Place - iPhone
• 2nd Place - A Stephen Few data visualization workshop
• 3rd Place - Stephen Few’s book - Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

Some other exceptional blog/web sites that you should check out are:

• Stephen Few’s - Perceptual Edge
• Nathan Yau’s - FlowingData
• Jorge Camoes’ - Charts
• Jon Peltier’s - PTS Blog
• Andrea Coutu’s - Consultant Journal
• Andrew Vande Moere’s - Infosthetics

This video is a little dated (been out about a year), but is well worth the 6 minutes it takes to watch.

The presentation is crisp and very well designed with a great shock factor. People using PowerPoint could do well to mimic the design of this presentation and put away the fifteen bullets per slide.

My suggestion: embrace change, evolve while taking responsibility for your own development and remove the word “can’t” from your vocabulary.

Some quotes:

• “The top 10 jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004 and we are preparing students for jobs that don’t even exist in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”
• “If MySpace subscribers were a country, it would be the 11th largest in the world.”
• “Who answered all of our questions before Google (B.G.)?”
• “By 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.”
• “About 1.5 exabytes of unique information will be generated this year, which is more than in the previous 5,000 years.”

Here is a table that defines byte sizes:

(Source: Wikipedia)