The BP Oil Spill

Since it first erupted on the news, the media has been bombarding the public with all kinds of guesstimates about the scale and scope of the BP oil disaster and has spawned countless infographics trying to convey the size of the oil spill. If It Was My Home has created the simplest and easiest one I've come across, with no numbers or figures or comparisons to previous oil spills. All it is is a picture of the oil spill overlaid on Google Maps. Awesome, frightening, and definitely drives the message home in a clear and concise manner.

via Flowing Data

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Unemployment by State

http://datadrivenconsulting.com/js/protovis/cartogramemp.html

Here's a fun interactive infographic that displays two variables over time: absolute number of unemployed people per state and percentage of unemployed people compared to total labor force. It even throws in an extra bonus by displaying each state's bubble in its geographic location with respect to the others.

Link to the interactive infographic is here: http://datadrivenconsulting.com/js/protovis/cartogramemp.html

via Chart Porn

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Internet Addiction

Normally I'm not really a fan of the super tall infographics that have been spreading like wildfire all over the Internet, but this one actually does a really good job in terms of simplicity of design, color scheme and clarity. The only thing that isn't clear to me is its comparison of time spent online per month versus total number of hours available. Where and how are they getting these numbers? Are they taking the total number of Internet users and multiplying that by the average number of hours a person spends on the Internet per month? This one section makes me dubious without some clarity into how they came up with this comparison, but otherwise this graphic is a good example of clean design, if you must insist on the tall-infographic-covered-in-clip-art look.

via Geekologie

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Pie Chart Art

OK this one isn't an infographic per se, but I just loved the artistry and detail that went into this image.

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College Degree Density

Wow these past couple weeks have been busy! Oh well, I'm back for a little bit at least and I've got some graphs saved up to share. This one has been floating around the Internet for the past few days:

The unit of measurement is number of degrees per square mile, which in of itself isn't bad but it doesn't put the figures into perspective. What would be really fascinating is to compare that number with the total number of people living per square mile. For example, the top two cities in the graph are San Francisco and New York. As a Bay Area resident and a frequent visitor to New York, I can tell you that the overall density and number of people in New York City is way, way higher than the overall density of San Francisco. With so many people packed into such a small space, it makes sense that New York has a high number of graduates, but as a percentage this group may be just a tiny fraction of the overall population. Considering San Francisco has a small total population and population density than New York, it's all the more impressive that it ranks on the top of the list. (of course, as a native, I may be a bit biased in my perceptions, hehehe).

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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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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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