Friday, May 14, 2010

The Title Says It All

Ouch, that hurts. This gem of a find is only bearable to look at if you follow the title and only go by the numbers. Looks like this one got published half baked. Flowing Data gave them some benefit of the doubt though:

"Here's my guess about what happened. A deadline was coming up quick, and a graphics editor put this together to get a feel for what the final design would look like. He then saved it as a different file, and then went to work. Except when it came time to send the file to the printers, the editor sent the wrong file. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often."

(via Flowing Data)

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Thursday, May 13, 2010

A Terrible, Terrible Infographic

This infographic makes me a sad panda. Not only is it really hard to draw any patterns or conclusions across any of the data because of the way it's displayed an organized, the little cutesy text bubbles filled with random facts actually cover up some of the numbers! Plus the reason behind the varying widths of the bars still eludes me (anyone know what variable that's supposed to represent?). This information is certainly fascinating, but would have been far more compelling if only they'd broken it up into three different chunks for eating out, groceries and spending or separated it by region or any other number of ways rather than a big messy tornado of fail.

(via Flowing Data)

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Pets in the U.S.

Here's a nice clean and simple infographic about pets in the U.S. Looks like I'm in a small minority of households that have a hamster. Don't worry Hammy, you may be one of 1.3 million, but I still love you.

(via Infographic Showcase)

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Monday, May 10, 2010

A Showcase of Bad Infographics

Any infographic designer or appreciator worth their salt should head over to Smashing Magazine and check out their in-depth article about the dos and don'ts of infographic design. They've gathered quite a collection of horrifically bad infographics that are either difficult to comprehend, misleading or both.To avoid making your own disaster or being inadvertently misled by poor design and misrepresentation, Smashing suggests asking yourself these important questions about the data:
  • How was it collected?
  • What are its limitations?
  • Which mathematical transformations are appropriate?
  • Which methods of display are appropriate?
  • Who collected it?
  • Why was it collected?
  • What is its context in a broader subject?
  • What is its context in the field of research that created it?


(via Smashing Magazine)

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An Infographic for the Geek in Me

How could I resist posting an infographic about Star Trek? Man you have to feel sorry for those red shirts sometimes....

(via Geekologie)

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Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Rise of the Huge Infographic

Head over to Flowing Data for a fun retrospective on the rise of the Humongous Infographic. You know, those massive infographics the size of a football field that rarely ever seem to fit on your computer screen anymore. Sometimes they're well done, well organized and full of interesting information and sometimes it feels like all that volume is just filled with gigantic fonts, random clip art and gibberish. How did it come to this? Find out here.

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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Color and Gender

xkcd, the go-to place for amusing cartoon infographics, graphs and charts, has published the results of their color survey in their usually humorous and quirky way. One of their most amusing discoveries involved the differences between how different genders name color. You can definitely see the branding and marketing goons' handiwork rather clearly here:

"Salmon." Heh. Then there's also their amusing breakdown of the top color names by gender. The most popular colors used by women were:

  1. Dusty Teal
  2. Blush Pink
  3. Dusty Lavender
  4. Butter Yellow
  5. Dusky Rose
And for the men:
  1. Penis
  2. Gay
  3. WTF
  4. Dunno
  5. Baige
Seriously men? The one color that's actually a color that made it to your most masculine list is misspelled? I guess it's OK when you consider that almost no one seems capable of spelling "fuchsia":

There's a lot more on the xkcd blog. It's definitely an amusing read. :)

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