The Why Axis
A collection of in depth writing about the visualizations that deserve your attention.
Looking for guest contributors - email: hello@thewhyaxis.info
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Mind the Gap - An Economic Chart Remake
Guest author Jon Schwabish is an economist with the U.S. federal government and creator of policy-relevant data visualizations. His website, policyviz.com, contains details about his one-day workshops on visualizing and presenting data for people in public policy. You can reach him at…
Apr 9 2013
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The Washington Post Plots Quality and Quantity of Life
In December the Washington Post published a visualization which attempts to answer the question asked directly in its title - "How long will we live - and how well?" This interactive scatterplot was created in four days to support this article about the release of the Global Burden of Disease…
Mar 21 2013
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WIDE Shows the Gaps in Education Equality Around the Globe.
After Interactive Things (IXT) published their visualization, World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) I decided to sit down with one of the chief architects, Christian Siegrist, to get a look at the design process for this piece. Christian told me that WIDE visualizes important data in…
Mar 7 2013
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The New York Times and Tesla Motors Engage in Chart Warfare
Tesla, the car maker named after the famed electrical engineer, has been attempting to revive the dream of the electric car with its powerful Model S. The company’s latest PR nightmare comes after NYT writer John Broder published an account of his test drive experience. The piece includes a…
Feb 16 2013
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Breaking Excel Defaults – A Government Chart Remake
Guest author Jon Schwabish – an economist with the U.S. federal government and creator of policy-relevant data visualizations. You can reach him at jschwabish@gmail.com or by following him on…
Jan 29 2013
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Posts on Process – November 2012
From Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design: “We can get closer to the wisdom of other people by having them explain their decisions – not just in How they were executed, but Why they were made… Asking Why unlocks a new form of beauty by making choices observable so they can be discussed…
Nov 13 2012
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Oh The Political Possibilities: 512 Paths to the White House
With the outcomes of presidential ballot battles in 80% of U.S. states seemingly decided, all attention is focused on the remaining battlegrounds. Candidates are spending vast amounts of money and time to sway just a few supposedly undecided voters in just a few states. In such an uncertain climate…
Nov 5 2012
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Google Consumer Barometer Promises Insight Through Visualization
The Consumer Barometer is a beautiful and immersive visualization presented by Google and produced by CLEVER°FRANKE. Experience it for yourself. The three main sections of the barometer (browse, graph, and data map) are all variations on a theme of visualizing the wealth of data collected by…
Oct 4 2012
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FF Chartwell Comes to the Web
I’ve created a number of example charts using FF Chartwell here. FontFont has released Travis Kochel’s Chartwell as a web font. If you weren’t familiar with the font before, it employs a clever use of the OpenType system and has been lauded as “disruptive” and “a graphing tool for…
Sep 26 2012
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The Map of Life, A Field Guide For The Future
The Map of Life plans to plot every species on the planet when it is complete. Talk about big data. For now it’s in a beta version and visualizes ranges and observations for 25,000 species compiled from a variety of data sources. Eventually there will be a set of Wikipedia-like functionality…
Sep 12 2012
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Marimekko Chart Shows the Makeup of Healthcare in the US
What do you get when you cross a tree map and a bar chart (kind of)? A Marimekko chart, of course. The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) has used this uncommon chart type to visualize U.S. Healthcare data. It’s the first of its kind I’ve seen in an interactive format and it’s well…
Aug 29 2012
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Sadly Static: Hurricanes Since 1851
In the first installment of Sadly Static we look at a gigantic graphic created by @johnnelsonIDV. John works at IDV Solutions, a producer of sophisticated geospatial visualizations, interactive and otherwise. John seems to have taken this on in his spare time noting in his blog post: “The best…
Aug 27 2012
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Healthy Apps Bring Visualization to Medical Care
It was only a matter of time before your phone was also a heart monitor. In this case it’s a heart monitor for animals, since AliveCor is not (yet) cleared for humans. The AliveCor Veterinary Monitor is a iPhone case and app combo that delivers ECGs wirelessly to your phone and desktop computer.…
Aug 8 2012
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Moneyball or Hairball? The Political Donor Visualization from WSJ
With a slightly less literal outer-space metaphor than the MotherJones piece we looked at previously, Political Moneyball is a robust interactive tool for visualizing the complex universe of political spending. Developed by the Wall Street Journal, Political Moneyball seems to present for…
Jul 26 2012
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Every Single Person in one Cartogram
The LA Times has published “Beyond 7 Billion,” a rich interactive feature covering the story of the exploding world population. Increasingly the Times has been producing rich content and some data visualizations including the Oscars Senti-meter which I critiqued a few months back . The world…
Jul 24 2012
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U.S. Job Market Shrinkage Visualized in a Sprawling Interactive
Jobs data is perhaps the most oft-cited data in the U.S. in times of a recovering economy leading up to election season. Numbers quoted by politicians seem to directly conflict with each other. As with polling data, jobs data is probably best explored by an individual with an interactive tool…
Jul 18 2012
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A Bird’s Eye View of the Political Landscape from the Pollster API
In the next few months there is going to be an ever increasing stream of statistics, polls, infographics and visualizations headed your way, all with the same subject: The US Presidential Election. In a politically charged environment it’s hard to know which media outlets to trust. What’s more,…
Jul 5 2012
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The Endangered Languages Project and Emotional Data Visualization
Endangered Languages is a brand new community of people across the world who care about the preservation of the knowledge and culture contained in language. The site allows them to collect samples and research about endangered languages in an accessible place on the web. The project is a…
Jul 2 2012
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Dark Money Universe Uncovers Constellations of Political Spending
The Dark Money Universe is a heavily metaphorical and informative visualization produced by MotherJones Magazine. This concept first appeared in print but now has been re-imagined on the web by a talented team. Using D3, EJ Fox was able to work with the MotherJones team to make this very important…
Jun 28 2012
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Sigma.js Cleans up Hairball Network Visualizations
Network visualization is a topic as complex as many of the hairballs it produces but Sigma.JS is designed to break through the clutter and graph networks that are more readable and user-friendly. It’s creator, Alexis Jacomy, has really pushed the practice of network visualization forward with…
Jun 25 2012
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The Reuters Macroscope Visualization You Need a Microscope to Read
For a news source in the top 250 global websites (source: Alexa), Reuters is lacking quality data driven journalism and critical thinking about interactive visualizations for their audience. This Greek election tracker from their Macroscope blog is displayed on its own page yet doesn’t take…
May 30 2012
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The Graph Lover’s Weather App
Your Hourly Forecast is the most useful weather app I’ve ever come across. It’s also a nice little piece of data visualization for your iPhone or iPad. This free app gives you a variety of weather metrics for any of the next 36 hours with a simple tap of the horizontal axis. Presenting basic…
May 24 2012
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Brightly Colored Bitly Map Gets Users Lost
This brightly colored choropleth map from The Guardian tries to connect a region in the UK with its preferred news source in a simple interactive map. -- The piece maps how links from bit.ly are shared by showing the sites the short links reference and the locations where they were clicked.…
May 17 2012
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The Guardian’s Gay Rights Rainbow Graph
The Guardian published this state-by-state visualization of gay rights laws in the US and while it certainly captures the user’s attention and encourages them to share, I fear the message gets lost in an overwrought design. To start, the circle visualization is visually overwhelming and takes…
May 9 2012
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The Role of Data Visualization in the 2012 French Presidential Race
The following is a guest article written by Jérôme Cukier (@jcukier), a talented visualization consultant from Paris, France. Government data can be used to inform citizens and is never more relevant than when they are called to express the ultimate political choice. With data, citizens can…
May 3 2012
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The Chronicle’s College Completion Site Gets Valedictorian
It’s damn near perfect. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s College Completion is a superb case study of how organizations should be presenting data to the public. Beyond delivering on the immediate goal of educating readers, this site contributes a sense of trust and authority to The…
May 3 2012
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Feltron Annual Reports Start to Feel Like Annual Reports
I should say that I am a big fan of Nick and his work and I appreciate what he has done to bring together the design and data visualization communities. People are genuinely excited when a new report drops and that’s a great thing. However, along with praise, we shouldn’t forget to apply a…
Feb 28 2012
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LA Times’ Senti-meter Inches Towards Oscar Predictions via Twitter
Combining visualization with massive data-producing social networks like Twitter has the potential to be really powerful. We haven’t reached the point where this massive amount of data can reliably be used to predict anything but the LA Times, in partnership with IBM and USC Annenberg Inovation…
Feb 23 2012
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Infographics for America – Displaying Data in the State of the Union
If you were one of the 2 million people that caught the State of the Union (or #sotu) last night on the White House website you had the option to watch the “enhanced broadcast” which included contextual information and visualizations along with the speech. Anyone who didn’t watch it can now…
Jan 25 2012
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The 2012 Political Visualization Race – New Hampshire Primaries Edition
This political season all major news and media outlets will be competing in the dynamic visualization race. We’re only at the New Hampshire Primaries and already the LA Times, CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Fox News, Google, and even The Guardian all…
Jan 11 2012
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Google Zeitgeist Misses the Mark for 2011
In case you didn’t catch this being quietly launched on a Friday, Google has released their Zeitgeist report of searches for 2011. Here’s the main interactive piece – a 3D multi-series bar chart. Andy Kirk has already thrown down some pretty salient points about why this may be the “worst…
Dec 19 2011
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Seeing The Spread of (Mis)information on Twitter
Rumors tend to run rampant on twitter and The Guardian just published a visualization to illustrate how these rumors evolve and are corrected in the context of the London riots. The stories featured are framed as either myths or truths and each section takes you through an individual timline of…
Dec 8 2011
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Can Visualization Untangle the Eurozone?
Needless to say things are in a bit of a tangled mess in the Eurozone. The only group of people who understand it less clearly than the European public is the America public. In an effort to reverse this the New York Times put out a graphic in its print publication to convey the scope and…
Nov 30 2011
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Making Music Visual: Interact with music history, taxonomy and anatomy.
Music doesn’t have to be invisible. The intangible nature of music drives people to add visual and now interactive layers on top of it. We’ll examine how three projects visualize different aspects of musical data. Simple interactions turn static timelines into informative media experiences,…
Nov 22 2011
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A Movement of Numbers: Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street is a movement about numbers, from the 99% to the 1%. Conversation is becoming a war of statistics about unemployment rates, taxation, corporate profits, average income and much more. It’s no surprise data visualization has become a central medium for communication in the midst…
Oct 27 2011
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Visualizing Yahoo Mail in Near Realtime
For every email you get in your Yahoo account, 4 spam emails get blocked. With 300 million users around the world there’s some interesting data being generated every second. Yahoo and Periscopic have joined forces to visualize the traffic for the number one email provider in America in near…
Oct 18 2011
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Interactive Hurricane Trackers and Transforming Viewers into Users
A weather map is one of the most abundant forms of complex data visualization in our lives today. Their importance increases dramatically as people need to make preparations and decisions based on the data they display. There’s been a recent trend of a ‘democratization’ of weather maps that…
Oct 6 2011
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Visualize Hierarchical Data with a Bubble Tree
If this visualization looks familiar to you it’s because you follow the career of David McCandless far too closely. It is, in fact, based on his design for Where Does My Money Go? (WDMMG) but has been re-imagined by Gregor Aisch. Gregor is the designer and visualization architect for the…
Sep 29 2011
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Thoughts on the Launch of Visual.ly
Visual.ly is a wildly successful startup promising to connect the public to publishers, designers and data. Stewart Langille, the CEO behind it all, launched the company in April and already has a serious roster of partnerships with major media producers. Visually has received a good deal of…
Jul 15 2011
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Make Your Own Better Life Index
Hundreds of list posts and rankings are published every day across the Internet. Designers of “infographics” have picked up on this trend and now are creating what amount to visual lists at an alarming rate. In this sea of mediocrity and bullet points the OECD Better Life Index shines like a…
Jun 20 2011
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Mixing the Wall Street Journal and Foursquare Produces Mixed Results
Location, location, location makes the jump to journalism with the new partnership between The Wall Street Journal and Foursquare. The partnership is an interesting mix of old media and new with Foursquare gaining new audiences and The Wall Street Journal getting serious tech cred. Early results of…
Jun 9 2011
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Better Census Maps with Dot-density
In the data visualization community of the U.S. it’s Census season and that means we have maps for days. How we understand census data has evolved immensely since its inception in 1790. Today, the importance of digitizing and releasing aggregate data publicly can’t be denied but efforts from…
Apr 3 2011
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Understanding Scale in Radiation Dosage Charts
We see more and more that major news events around the world generate infographics and data visualizations as a form of journalism. However, in the case of the Fukushima meltdowns the visualizations popped up in response to journalism about radiations levels in Japan and the Western United States.…
Apr 3 2011
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The Path of Protest – A Living Timeline from The Guardian
The ripple effects of unrest, protest and regime change have been echoing around the Mid-East since before the beginning of the new year, each seeming to start a new chain of events. The Guardian, one of the UK’s leading news-sources, has been steadily doing excellent reporting throughout with…
Mar 30 2011
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CFO Outlook Survey; Visualizing Qualitative Information
From forming a partnership with Visualizing.org and sponsoring their recent 24 hour Visualizing Marathon to working with TEDMED to visualize publich health, GE has made a name for itself as a supporter of the data visualization community. They’ve also produced visualizations, some better than…
Mar 28 2011
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Infographic Record of 2011 Egyptian Revolution from Chartbeat
Half a world away we tried to keep up with the latest news out of Egypt, often filtered through tight security and language translation. During the course of the 18 day Egyptian revolution, as it is now understood, the world turned to cutting edge communication mediums like Twitter as well as…
Mar 25 2011
