Randy Krum's Blog, page 15

City Street Network Orientation

 

The City Street Network Orientation infographic represents 25 of the United States' largest cities and the direction of their streets. The data is shown by using a polar histogram, which show the direction of the streets (based on their cardinal orientation) and their frequency (the length on the graph). The infographic was created by Geoff Boeing, Urban planning professor at Northeastern University.

Using OpenStreetMap data, Geoff Boeing charted the orientation distributions of major cities:

"Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar’s directionrepresents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings."

So you can easily spot the gridded street networks, and then there’s Boston and Charlotte that are a bit nutty. Check out Boeing’s other chart for orientation of major non-US cities.

See also Stephen Von Worley’s color-coded maps and Seth Kadish’s charts from 2014 that showed the same thing but used Census data instead of OpenStreetMap.

 

Found on Flowing Data

Animated History of Home Siding Materials

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Fixr has published their research of How the Use of Home Siding Materials Has Changed Over 40 Years as this animated data visualization changing the proportions over time.

It's a little odd to watch because it starts out looking like a bad pie chart with cute rounded corners. This is really a simple version of a voronoi diagram where the area of each section represents the proportional values.

The video above was created using the results from the census on exterior finishes of single-family homes. It looks at the historical use of wood, brick, stucco, vinyl, fiber and ‘other’ options starting in 1977 and ending in 2017. The census accounts for up to 1.6 million houses each year and includes homes across the U.S.A., so provides a broad look at how finishes have risen and fallen in popularity over the full period. These changes in popularity not only account for aesthetic fashionability but also availability, cost and practicality. From a trend perspective, each finish dominated a specific decade, in terms of houses completed in that finish. Brick dominated the 70s, wood dominated the 80s, vinyl, which only became available in the 90s, dominated that decade, and stucco and fiber cement dominated the 2000s. ‘Other’ materials also saw their highest use during the late 80s and 90s.

Visualization of Hurricane Florence's Path

Harry Stevens from Axios created a simple but great visualization of Why Hurricane Florence is so unusual — and so dangerous. The DataViz shows what makes the path of Hurricane Florence different than all of the past major hurricanes to hit the Carolinias.

Extremely Detailed 2016 Election Map

The New York Times has published An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, and it's fascinating to explore! 

Their full article, Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity: Highlights From a Very Detailed Map of the 2016 Election, examines some of the more interesting patterns, insights and inconsistencies.

The election results most readers are familiar with are county maps like the ones we produce at The Times on election night. But votes are cast at a much finer unit of geography — in precincts, which may contain thousands of voters but in some cases contain only a handful. Our previous election maps contained results for about 3,100 counties; here we show results for more than 168,000 voting precincts.

The interactivity is really well done, made possible through the integration with MapBox, and you can zoom in to view the data down to the smallest voting precincts. Pop-up information will tell you the exact number of votes at the precinct level.

Here's an animated journey (accelerated) around the country to 14 major cities:

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How America Uses its Land

America's land use is very diverse and scattered throughout the states. By using surveys, satellite images and categorizations the U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. Bloomberg took that data, and created the How America Uses its Land infographics. The infographics use the map to show both how much of the country is made up of a certain land use, and where the majority of it is located.

Using surveys, satellite images and categorizations from various government agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. The data can’t be pinpointed to a city block—each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land. But piecing the data together state-by-state can give a general sense of how U.S. land is used.

Gathered together, cropland would take up more than a fifth of the 48 contiguous states. Pasture and rangeland would cover most of the Western U.S., and all of the country’s cities and towns would fit neatly in the Northeast.

 

Found on https://5wvelascoblog.com

Giveaway: 5W Information Graphics & Data Visualization Workshop Dallas

This month (August 2018) I'm giving away ONE FREE ticket to attend the 5W Information Graphics and Data Visualization 2-day workshop in Dallas, TX on September 13-14, 2018.

Register on the Giveaways Page by August 31, 2018 to be entered, and the winner will be chosen on September 1st!

Juan and Samuel Velasco currently have workshops scheduled in four cities across the U.S., so I'm jumping on the chance to attend and help promote the workshop in Dallas. I highly recommend you check out the schedule and attend one if they are close to you.

An Introduction to Hydroponics

Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soils. An Introduction to Hydroponics infographic goes over the benefits of using the technique, and a couple of different methods you could use. It is a great visual explanation of each setup and could really come in handy for any newbies interested in the field. Just make sure you read the section on what plants are best for hydroponics! You can find the full details at Green and Vibrant. 

Hydroponics is a dirt-free, space-saving, water-effective method of growing soilless.

This practice is not new. In fact, the earliest records of Hydroponics dated back to the ancient civilizations. And modern Hydroponics has been used widely in the commercial greenhouses as well as at home for over 30 years.

If you're just getting started with Hydroponics, or you're looking to hone and your knowledge and skills.

You come to the right place.

In this guide, you'll learn about the most important details about Hydroponics and all the basic knowledge to set up a year-round hydroponic garden of your own.

Read more at https://www.greenandvibrant.com

 

Found on Green and Vibrant

The UK's Brexit Options in the EuroZone Visualized

The team at Information Is Beautiful have visualized the different options available to the UK in EuroZones: The Brexit Landscape, and have been making updates as the situation evolves.

Brexit? The Eurozone? The European Economic Area? The European Free-Trade Area? The European Customs Union? Whaaat?

A graphic that hopefully clarifies the complex structure of the European Union and the UK’s various routes and options for Brexit.

UPDATE: 15th July 2018: The saga continues. The UK announces its ideas for a “common rulebook” and “facilitated customs arrangement”, effectively a ‘soft’ Brexit.
Hard Brexit ministers resign.

UPDATE 3rd July 2017: It’s getting complicated! Added 2 more Brexit routes. See the first version.
UPDATE 1st AUG 2017: Detailed UK opposition party Labour’s positions. Refined ‘Free Trade Brexit’ & typical negotiation times (from here). Clarified a key difference between EEA (good & services) & Customs Unions (just goods). Read a useful, clarifying article
UPDATE 28th AUG 2017: UK opposition party, Labour, has now consolidated under a “soft Brexit” position.

 

 

Interactive Infographic From Coca-Cola Spain

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Coca-Cola Spain is using the tool ThingLink to add animation and interactivity to their marketing infographics. ThingLink allows you to create "hotspots" that pop-up additional images, text and even videos.

Description: Coca-Cola Spain masters the art of digital storytelling by using interactive infographics on their blog.  In addition to it's attractive design, this infographic captures viewer attention with the use of motion (via GIFs).  In the infographic below, Coca-Cola shares how they have driven employment and progress in Spain since 1953. 

What Your Font Says About You

What Your Font Choices Say About You infographic from GetVoip is a comical explanation of why we choose what font we use.

In 1975, two Swiss designers, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann came out with the font Helvetica. Since then, it has been used on some of the biggest brands in the world, such as Verizon, 3M, Kawasaki, Jeep, Tupperware, Target, Panasonic, and Apple.

What is it that makes this font and others so alluring?

For most of us, unless you are a designer in some capacity, the font choice on reading materials is overlooked or completely ignored. But there may be something that still triggers in the subconscious that helps you recognize a good font. In one study at MIT, subjects were found to be in a better mood after reading something with “good” typography. The subjects also saw improved performance in certain cognitive tasks after reading the “good” typography instead of the bad.

Today, there are over 33,000 fonts available on sites like MyFonts.com With so many choices, and so much at stake, how do you know which to choose? And furthermore, when choosing a font, do you know what message it might be conveying to your readers?

We put together an infographic below that looked at some of the most popular fonts of the day and provided some feedback on what message you might be sending with that font choice or style.

Whether you are drafting an important email or deciding on a font to use for your brand, you will certainly want to know how this decision will come to define you. We all have likely experienced either sending or receiving an embarrassing misspelling, grammatical error, or autocorrect failure, but choosing the wrong font can become the biggest mistake of all.

If you have ever been concerned about how you will be perceived by your choice of font, your concerns are warranted. Dan Gilbert, the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team, received a maelstrom of criticism after his open letter regarding Lebron James’ move to the Miami Heat was written in the Comic Sans font.

When choosing your font it’s best to default to a standard serif or sans-serif versus a more decorative or script font, even if you are resentful that your elementary school teacher said that you would need to know cursive in life––lies!

What does using Trebuchet on the Cool Infographics site say about me? 

Thank you to Drew for sending in the link!