{"id":143,"date":"2008-05-14T00:47:30","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T05:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=143"},"modified":"2008-05-14T00:47:30","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T05:47:30","slug":"the-art-of-information-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/the-art-of-information-graphics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Information Graphics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently ran across a couple of really great examples of how information can be conveyed dramatically with infromation graphics and one example of how to fix graphics that aren’t so good.<\/p>\n

First, from the Radical Cartography project<\/a>, a map of all nuclear explosions since 1945.\u00a0 This map encodes a lot of information fairly simply – we can see where nuclear tests have taken place, countries are indicated by color, and blast yield is indicated by size.\u00a0 Click on the image to see the full version.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Next, from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environment Outlook<\/a> report, you can see a great illustration of how little of the world’s water is freshwater and how little of that is readily available in rivers and lakes.\u00a0 Click on the image to see the full-sized version.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Why point out good example of information design?\u00a0 Because even the professionals get it very wrong a lot of the time.\u00a0 Bob Nystrom wrote a great post<\/a> about how little information is presented in CNN’s chart of the delegate totals for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.\u00a0 Here’s their version:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Without looking at the numbers, can you tell who’s in the lead?\u00a0 Can you tell how close the race is to the end?\u00a0 Do you read the bars left-to-right or up-and-down?\u00a0 Here’s Nystrom’s improvement:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Everything becomes clearer.<\/p>\n

Got any good (or bad) examples?\u00a0 Post them in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently ran across a couple of really great examples of how information can be conveyed dramatically with infromation graphics and one example of how to fix graphics that aren’t so good. First, from the Radical Cartography project, a map of all nuclear explosions since 1945.\u00a0 This map encodes a lot of information fairly simply […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[146,109,252,96],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-chartjunk","tag-information-design","tag-information-graphics","tag-maps"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}