Category Archives: Information Design

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Hand-Drawn Data Visualizations of African-American Life

 

Holy cow, look at these incredible hand-drawn data visualizations by W.E.B. Du Bois from 1900.

I admit that I knew and know very little about Du Bois and certainly had no idea that he created such visually unique and careful visualizations. The critic in me wants to say that some of these  do not hold to modern best data viz practices, but damn, sometimes you want to get lost in a careful study of data and spend some time with beautiful meaningful graphic design. And that’s what you certainly do with these visualizations.

Check out all of them at Public Domain Review and as so often is the case, major h/t to Kottke.

 

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Be Like Hans Rosling with PowerPoint Morph

Sadly, the world lost statistician, doctor and TED personality Hans Rosling yesterday. In honor of his endless enthusiasm for and influence on data and data visualization, I put together this little tutorial on how to approximate his Trendalyzer software to create animated bubble charts using PowerPoint’s morph transition.

If you haven’t seen Hans present, take a look at some of my favorites:

The Best Stats you’ve Never Seen • 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes • Global Population Growth, Box by Box • Asia’s Rise: How and When

 

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A Calendar Timeline Slide

 

We’re always looking to create timelines that are more interesting and more easily read. Recently a client kept talking about upcoming events that “were on the calendar,” and so we decided to ditch the normal linear timeline approach and just show an actual calendar.

I like how this literally visualizes the dates rather than putting them abstractly on a horizontal line.

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visual training presentation