How to Make Stacked Bar Charts Clearer

Jon Peltier has written up a great post on his blog dissecting a stacked bar chart of data originally published by Gartner. The original chart looks like this:

He goes through and makes the chart clearer, step by step, to make trends in the data easier to discern. Eventually he gets to this chart, which looks like a total breath of fresh air when put up next to the original:

Jon goes through several different ways of displaying the data. It's definitely worth the quick read here.

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The Best Cities for Working Mothers

The online financial software service, Mint, has aggregated much of its collected user data to create an interactive infographic about the best cities for working mothers to work, based on pay, unemployment, cost of living, etc. New York, San Francisco, San Jose and Houston show up quite a lot in the breakdown. Check it out here.

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Whale Sharks

One of the more creative and cute infographics I've seen on GraphJam:

(via GraphJam)

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The Fundamentals of Graphical Perception

The folks over at Flowing Data put together a great post about how people perceive graphics and ranked the best types of graphs based on people's ability to interpret them. Fascinating.

http://flowingdata.com/2010/03/20/graphical-perception-learn-the-fundamentals-first/

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The Changing Colors of the Seasons

The folks over at Flickr Flow have published a very innovative way of showing how colors vary across the seasons. Below is a color wheel representing an aggregate of all the colors that can be found in different pictures of the Boston Commons during different times of the year. Here's their own description of the piece:

"The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image below is an early sketch from the piece. Summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise."

Read the full post for close-ups of each season and the final infographic.

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Google Public Data Explorer

The big office complex down the road known around these parts as "The Goog" (or for those lucky enough to know people who work there, the place with the delicious free noms) has just announced the new Public Data Explorer for their search engine. I'm guessing it's their response to Wolfram Alpha, but the feature is capable of generating some pretty spiffy looking interactive graphs. For example, check out this interactive graphic showing life expectancy vs. fertility rate over time.

You can get the full lowdown about the new feature at the company's official blog.

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Comparing space required for transportation

This set of images is so simple, and yet it gets its point across quite vividly. It definitely makes a good case for not driving a car with hardly any words at all. If only I didn't live in a sprawl where public transportation requires driving a car to get to it!

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Fast Food in America

Today while going through my blog feed I noticed two versions of the same map made by Stephen Von Worley. The first emphasizes the dominance of Sonic in Texas:

(via Geekologie)

The next is intended to highlight McDonalds:

(via Consumerist)

Through a simple change in color scheme, what was glaringly obvious in one version suddenly blends in and is almost unnoticeable in another.

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