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The Density of Deer Heels
This graph shows the density of osteocytes, or bone cells, in different parts of the calcaneum (heel) of a mule deer. Cranial, caudal, medial, and lateral translate as front, back, inside, and outside....
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March of the Ratites
The job was a chart that would display the fossil history of the ratites. (Ratites are the giant flightless birds that include the ostrich, emu and the like). There was one previous attempt: the...
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A Robin Williams Library
Robin Williams (no, not the once-funny-now-supposedly-heartwarming-but-actually-mawkish actor) writes about design and type for non-professionals. Not many years ago, authors did the typing and someone...
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March of the Monarchs
Every year, the Journey North Project tracks sightings of the first Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) of spring, and produces maps like this one. The legend shows the first sightings in given...
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Mountains of War
In the Sunday, March 19th New York Times Magazine, accompanying an article on the decline in global conflict, was the following chart: Apart from the odd terminology (extrastate vs. interstate? And...
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Reflections on the Planets
Here is a chart from Wilkinson, illustrating the bubble plot method, where a third variable is encoded by the size of the marker. Unfortunately, planets are not a good data set for demonstrating bubble...
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Fixing Excel’s Charts
Everyone makes fun of Excel, but sometimes it’s all you have. How can we fix its dreadful graphs? Here’s a data set showing the male and female body masses in kilograms of the ratite birds. Let’s graph...
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New York Times Style
The New York Times generally has excellent information graphics, and uses a distinctive house style. Here are three typical graphs, from this article in the May 7 edition. Note the strong contrast...
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More on the Planets
One problem with depicting the solar system in an information graphic is that the enormous sizes and distances are hard to grasp. The usual solution is to use logarithms to compress things, but these...
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The Graphical Octants
At a recent all-day workshop devoted to information presentation, some bright sparks dreamed up three axes along which you can position any information graphic. We normally just assume the...
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Better Axes
A good rule when making graphs is to remove needless impediments. Every extra act of interpretation we ask of the reader is a chance for them to misunderstand, be baffled, or get frustrated and move...
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A Tufte Library
To me, the most important books on presenting data graphics are by Edward Tufte. People who create charts as part of their job should keep one or more of them close by, and regularly reread them. The...
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Charting HTML
The artist/coder Sala, responsible for the 1000 numbers project, has created an applet that turns an web page into a color-coded diagram that depicts the HTML hierarchy. Here’s the main page of...
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Adding Variables
Two surveys recently looked at public acceptance of evolution in a range of countries. This one arranged the data in order of decreasing acceptance. Note the pretty good color choice: red for...
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Beach Mouse Pelt Map
UC San Diego biologist Hopi Hoekstra and her co-authors found that the light-colored beach mice of Florida differed from their darker cousin by a single nucleotide in one gene—at least in Western...
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Ditch the Tables, NYT!
Tables are often better than charts, especially with just a few data points. But sometimes a graph is what you need. Here’s an example from the Sunday New York Times magazine of August 6th. It shows...
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The Scientist’s Rainbow
How many colors do you need? Color costs money to print, and disappears when you laser print, fax, or photocopy a graphic, and some people (like me) have trouble seeing it. This is why I use grayscale...
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False Advertising
Almost every weekend the New York Times Magazine accompanies their first main story with a relevant infographic. They tend to be commissioned from outside agencies, and sometimes lack the good design...
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Wacky Wheel of Wedges
Not particularly wanting to harsh on the same design company twice, but the New York Times Magazine included another screwed-up chart on Sunday, February 18th. In this one there are only nine actual...
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Deceptive Areas
People are poor at accurately judging areas; they do much better comparing linear measures like the lengths of a bar or the heights of a point. Areas can be useful where precision’s not...
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