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The World’s Most Valuable Sports Teams
This visualization shows the most valuable sports teams in 2017 and how much their value has changed since the previous year. This was a potential assignment from How Much that wasn’t selected for publication, but I love the visual pun of ball speed lines to show value change, so wanted to share here.
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How we Really View Data Visualizations
There is a lot of research and writing on how to design effective data visualizations. Some researchers measure the speed and accuracy with which people read values from a visualization and exhort us to use bar charts. Others will point to psychological principles such as gestalt laws or preattentive processing 1 as ways of tricking […]
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In Defence of the Humble Pie Chart
It seems to have become a truism in data visualization that pie charts are to be avoided. A Google search for “avoid pie charts” returns 1.4 million results. At the top of the list are articles with titles ranging from the extreme (Pie Charts are the Worst) to the fanatical (Death to Pie Charts). This […]
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Data Visualization Aesthetics: Why Information should be Beautiful
Aesthetics in data visualization can be a controversial topic. On the one hand we have the sage advice of Edward Tufte ringing in our ears about the perils of “chart junk”1 that obscures meaning and impedes comprehension. On the other hand there’s people like David McCandless and his popular book/blog Information is Beautiful2 which accepts […] -
Colour in Data Visualization – Part 2: Applications
This post is the conclusion of my two-part look into the use of colour in data visualization. In the first post we covered the prerequisite theory. In this post we will use that theory to effectively select colours in a range of data visualization situations. […] -
Colour in Data Visualization – Part 1: Theory
How to use colour effectively in data visualisations seems to be one of those topics that everyone knows something about, but few seem to know enough. Although I’m probably in the same boat, over the last few years my work has required me to learn a lot more about it. I thought it would be […] -
HCL Colour Space Viewer
I’ve been writing up my thoughts on how to effectively use colour in data visualizations. As part of this process I created a little tool for viewing the HCL colour space and various slices through it. If none of this makes any sense, then just wait for my upcoming blog posts.
