Randy Krum's Blog, page 5

Why Most Charts Suck - Podcast Interview

Last week I was interviewed by Lea Pica on The Present Beyond Measure podcast! Lea’s podcast covers the intersection of data visualizations and presentations, and we had such a fun conversation!

Listen to the entire interview in your browser or in the podcast player of your choice: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.

From Lea’s description:

Randy dishes about the tyranny of the default, the differences between data visualizations for discovery and communication, and why we shouldn’t always use colors on everything! Randy also talks about building on templates, the problems with numbers, and the scale of visual perception.

To finish off, we get some insight into Randy’s three keys of good data viz; making your charts understandable, memorable, and actionable!

And in this episode, Randy shares all his wisdom regarding making better charts and how to pick the right kind of chart for what you are trying to accomplish!

In This Episode, You’ll Learn…

The real job of a data visualization designer.

Why most charts suck!

The value and power of data story arcs.

Randy’s three keys to good data viz!

The difference between Data Visualizations and Infographics.

About the free resources that are available on the Cool Infographics site.

The Present Beyond Measure podcast is one of over 15 data visualization related podcasts in my directory of DataViz Shows. Check them all out!

Visualizing Everyone that has Ever Lived

How do you visualize every human that has ever lived in the last 2 million years? Max Roser with Our World in Data had the idea to turn us all into grains of sand within an hourglass, and to equate the passing of people to the passing of time. The Humanity Today and Humanity’s Past infographic highlights a few key points in history and gives us a perspective of just how population growth has exploded over the last 2000 years.

Our past

Before we look ahead, let’s look back. How many came before us? How many humans have ever lived?

It is not possible to answer this question precisely, but demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have tackled the question using the historical knowledge that we do have.

There isn’t a particular moment in which humanity came into existence, as the transition from species to species is gradual. But if one wants to count all humans one has to make a decision about when the first humans lived. The two demographers used 200,000 years before today as this cutoff.1

The demographers estimate that in these 200,000 years about 109 billion people have lived and died.2

It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in. The languages we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use – what we know we learned from them. The houses we live in, the infrastructure we rely on, the grand achievements of architecture – much of what we see around us was built by them.

Our present

In 2022 7.95 billion of us are alive. Taken together with those who have died, about 117 billion humans have been born since the dawn of modern humankind.

This means that those of us who are alive now represent about 6.8% of all people who ever lived.

These numbers are hard to grasp. I tried to bring it into a visualization to put them into perspective.3

It’s a giant hourglass. But instead of measuring the passage of time, it measures the passage of people.

Each grain of sand here represents 10 million people: each year 140 million babies are born. So we add 14 grains of sand to the hourglass. Every year, 60 million people die; this means 6 grains pass through the hourglass and are added to the large number of people who have died.4

As noted on the graphic, this is an updated adaptation of a 2013 visualization by Oliver Uberti .

Found on Daily Infographic

The Dirty Bed Cleaning Guide

Keeping your home clean can be a full time job. The Dirty Bed Cleaning Guide by naplab can help you keep track of how often to clean your bed for optimal healthiness!

Your bed and mattress is more filthy than you realize. Within 2 weeks your clean sheets will have nearly 6,000,000 bacteria per square inch². By 3 weeks that number grows to 9.2 million². Learn how often to wash your entire bed setup.

This calendar visualization is a clean, simple, visual reminder that we all need to do more than just throw the sheets into the laundry. It’s effective to visualize the actual frequency of each event across months like this design does.

However, after that, the design gets lazy and all of the statistics below are hidden in text. A big missed opportunity here to create data visualizations for these stats which would make them relevant and meaningful to the audience. The impact of these stats is lost because the design doesn’t put them into visual context for the reader. Most readers of infographics don’t read all of the text from top-to-bottom. They’re only reading an infographic for 5-10 seconds total, and visualizations are must faster to understand.

Should You Hate Daylight Saving Time?

Recently the Senate passed a bill that would make Daylight Savings Time (or DST) permanent by unanimous consent. (and its passage even surprised some Senators) But even though we may gripe twice a year about the sudden time changes, would making DST permanent be a good thing?

Back in 2015, Andy Woodruff took a deeper look into DST and mapped out how the time changes affect sunrise and sunset times across the United States. Depending on your preferences you could actually love it or hate it. Andy’s Should You Hate Daylight Savings Time infographic uses “reasonable” Sunrise time at 7:00 AM or earlier and “reasonable” sunset time of 6:00 PM or later. However, you can interact with his maps and create your own “reasonable” times to find out where you stand.

Latitude affects how early or late the sun rises and sets, but what the clock says depends on a location’s longitude within its time zone. The farther east it is, the earlier the sun will rise and set. Considering all this, I want to map sunrise and sunset times in the United States and see how they are affected by daylight saving time. I’ve done so by using a little bit of GIS and the super handy SunCalc JavaScript library by Vladimir Agafonkin.

Let’s map how many days of the year have reasonable sunrise and sunset times with and without daylight saving time. I define “reasonable” times as 7 AM and 6 PM. That’s kind of arbitrary, but assuming roughly half an hour of twilight, it at least puts some light in the sky around the time the average American wakes up (6:30ish based on some cursory poking around) and at the end of the business day. But you can define them differently. Explore the coarsely gridded map below and see the geography of sunrise and sunset with and without daylight saving time.

To summarize, these are the scenarios using my preferred times.

In 2019, Andy created an updated Daylight Saving Time Gripe Assistant Tool so you could evaluate the benefits of DST based on where you live, and your preferences for sunrise and sunset.

NOTE: As you can see in the default preferences of the tool, by far most of the country would benefit from abolishing DST instead of making permanent.

Map of the Internet 2021

Map of the Internet 2021 visualizes the most popular websites in the style of an old historical map, created by Martin Vargic at Halcyon Maps. The sizes of the Internet “countries” on the map are based on the their relative web traffic, and clustered by type of website.

After a better part of a year of work, I am excited to show you a brand new Map of the Internet, up to date for the year 2021.

Inspired by design of historical maps, this project aims to concisely, but still comprehensively visualize the current state of the World Wide Web, and document the largest and most popular websites over the period of 2020-2021, along with their countless aspects and features.

This work was originally inspired by the “Map of Online Communities“ by Randall Munroe, and further by my own maps of the internet 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 previously published in 2014-2015.

The Internet has come a LONG WAY since Randall Munroe’s original design I posted about in 2008.

From Martin Vargic:

Compared to any previous iteration of the Map of the Internet, this new version is many times more detailed and informative. It includes several thousand of some of the most popular websites, represented as distinct "countries", which are grouped together with others of similar type or category, forming dozens of distinct clusters, regions and continents that stretch throughout the map, such as "news sites", "search engines", "social networks", "e-commerce", "adult entertainment", "file sharing", "software companies" and so much more. In the center of it all can be found ISPs and web browsers, which form the core and backbone of the internet as we know it, while the far south is the domain of the mysterious "dark web".

Color schemes of websites are based on the dominant colors of their user interface or logo. To add further detail and provide deeper insight, many features and services provided by these websites, their sections and content categories, as well as distinct content creators, are labeled as cities and towns (which number at well over 10 thousand). Website founders and CEOs are represented as capital cities, while hundreds of the most popular users of social networks and celebrities can be found in the realms of Youtube, Facebook, or Twitter. Mountains, hills, seas and valleys represent a wide variety of aspects of the internet, its culture and computer science overall, while almost a hundred of some of the most important internet and computing pioneers are also featured on the map in the names of underwater ridges.

Visualizing Ukraine's Trade

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is rapidly reshaping both countries’ international relations and it’s especially timely for this Visualizing Ukraine's Trade infographic from Visual Capitalist to take a look into the Ukraine’s top trading partners and products. I really like this visualization, and it intrigues me because it combines a couple different visual formats into one. It takes a little effort to understand everything that’s going on here.

At its heart, this is a Chord Diagram, as displayed in the center circle. The top ten trading partner countries are arranged in descending order down the left side of the circle, and the top 10 products for import and export are arranged along the right side. Weighted lines show the amount of each type of product traded connected with the appropriate country.

The Blue/Yellow color scheme, pulled from the Ukraine flag, works very well to differentiate Imports vs. Exports. It also avoids the overused stoplight colors of Red/Green and the many issues with those colors.

Outside the circle, the visualization changes into a combination of a Nightingale Chart and the Chord Diagram lines are extended to create many Doughnut Chart segments. You can see how the trade numbers with China extend further out than any other country, which is supposed to represent the higher total trade value, and get smaller as you look down the countries. Each individual country adds up to 100% creating its own small doughnut chart segment visualizing the difference between imports and exports.

PROBLEM: One problem I see here, is the Nightingale visualization seems to be calculating the proportional radius distance based on the total trade value. You can see this as China is roughly twice the radius of Germany, because it’s twice the total trade value. This creates a False Visualization, since we see the area of these shapes to represent the values, not the radius. This is more difficult to calculate since we aren’t using simple rectangles here.

There’s a map in the background, that you might miss. Centered on Ukraine, which is highlighted in the center of the visualization, the rest of Europe, Africa and the Middle East can be seen as the background to the entire infographic.

Found on Daily Infographic

Getting to Aha! Podcast Interview

I was interviewed earlier this month by Darshan Mehta on the Getting to Aha! podcast. You can hear the entire interview on the podcast player of your choice: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PlayerFM, Stitcher, Amazon Music, and bCast.

In this episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Randy Krum, Founder & Chief Designer at InfoNewt . They discuss Randy’s aha! journey, his career, the design process for clients’ data insights, simple marketing strategies and psychology, presentation of data, and much more.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

👉 Visualize your data because visual information is not only easier and faster to understand, but it's more memorable.

👉 “Go beyond (software) defaults.”

👉 “Focus on one thing that you're trying to communicate, don't try and throw everything into one chart.”

👉 “Try to minimize the text as much as possible and make as much of that communication visual as you can so that they're paying attention to you…”

👉 Make your visuals relevant to the data/message you're trying to pass across and make them memorable for the audience.

👉 “Data visualization design is not about making your charts pretty. It's really about communicating the data.”

👉 Help clients figure out the insights they want to communicate and access the thought processes behind them by walking them through a design process.

Seven Summits

The Seven Summits infographic from World Atlas places the tallest mountain from each continent right next to each other for easy visual context.

The Seven Summits are the highest mountain peaks of each of the seven continents. From the rarified air of the Himalayas to the plains of Africa and polar glaciers of Antarctica, the Seven Summits form a collection of selected peaks stretching to the far reaches of the globe. So far, only 350 people in the world have summited the seven peaks.

The Bass list, named after the American climber Dick Bass who completed the summits in April 1985, forms the most accurate list of the summits. The Bass Seven Summits are Asia's Everest (8,848 m), South America's Aconcagua (6,961 m), North America's Denali (6,194 m), Africa's Kilimanjaro (5,895 m), Europe's Elbrus (5,642 m), Antarctica's Vinson (4,892 m), and Australia's Kosciuszko (2,228 m).

Read more at The Seven Summits - WorldAtlas

What Redistricting Looks Like in Every State

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What Redistricting Looks Like in Every State is an updating tracker of proposed congressional maps. This is going to be a popular topic all year, and the interactive map by FiveThirtyEight shows how redistricting benefits Democrats or Republicans in the 2022 midterms and beyond. State and local governments are using information collected from the 2020 census report to redistrict each state. There are multiple states that have not been released yet however the graphic below shows the proposed dates for the next few updates.

I prefer the grid visualization over the map. The map has the same problem as most election maps in that it’s visualizing the real estate area of the districts. This over-emphasizes the the rural areas with more land, but less people. I think the grid visualization does a better job of representing the count of districts that are changing or already have a clear majority.

Visit FiveThirtyEight to interact with the data and check in as the map is updated.

False Visualizations: Getting Circles Sizes Wrong

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Today’s example of getting it WRONG is The Biggest Unicorns in 2021 infographic from Visual Capitalist. Assuming all of the data is good, all of the circle sizes in this design are wrong and don’t match the data. The circles were sized by changing the diameter instead of changing the area.

Let me show you what I mean:

Consider a comparison where the math is easy, Canva at $40.0B is 2x the valuation of J&T Express at $20.B. If I pull those two circles out of the design, you can clearly see that the diameter of two $20.0B circles fits perfectly in the $40.0B circle. This demonstrates that the circles are sized by diameter instead of area. Also, when I adjust the size of the Canva circle in my software to 2” diameter, the J&T Express circle becomes exactly 1” in diameter.

Directly below that I show the correct circles sizes by calculating the correct diameter of the J&T Express circle as 1.414” compared to the same 2” circle for Canva.

I’ve been posting about this problem in data visualization design for 10 years now, but designers still make the mistake of sizing circles by changing the diameter to match the data.

From the Cool Infographics book (2013):

It’s key for data visualization designers to understand that we visually compare the sizes of objects based on their area (not their height).

The problem becomes more difficult when visualizing data by changing the sizes of nonstandard shapes: circles, icons, logos and so on. This is where many designers mistakenly create data visualizations that don’t actually match the data because they don’t do the math required.

This visualization doesn’t match the data at all and becomes a false visual. The reason for this is that you are changing the size of two dimensions to represent one-dimensional data. Unlike rectangles, you can’t keep the width constant and change only the height of a circle. It wouldn’t be a circle anymore.

This is EXACTLY this issue I described in the Bubble Comparison and Nested Bubbles video I contributed to Jon Schwabish’s One Chart at a Time video series.

Sizing Circles for Data Visualization is an easy reference sheet for designers I posted on the InfoNewt website. It’s a free PDF to download so everyone has the information and the formula to calculate the correct circles sizes for using circles in data visualizations and infographics.