We don’t work on graphics about Politics very often, but in the past few years we have enjoyed doing a few assignments with the team at Politico Magazine. Politico is a political journalism company that covers politics and policy in the United States and internationally. Its coverage in Washington, D.C., includes the U.S. Congress, lobbying, media and the presidency.
The Magazine has great design and illustration, led by Creative Director Janet Michaud. On occasion of President Trump’s State of the Union speech and his perennially low approval rating, we are unearthing our most recent graphic for the Politico 50 Survey, published every September. The yearly survey is a questionnaire that aims to provide a glimpse into the opinions, predictions, fears and hopes of the most influential minds in American politics.
For the last couple of years we have been involved in creating infographics for Rotunda, the official magazine of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (AMNH).
The museum was founded in 1869. Located across Central Park in Manhattan, New York City, it’s one of the largest museums in the world with more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The museum averages about five million visits annually. Its collections contain over 33 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. Precisely, one of our graphics consisted of showing a breakdown of the entire collection:
The magazine is distributed among AMNH members. The double-page graphics cover a variety of Science and Nature topics, often associated with ongoing exhibitions in the museum. Most of them are illustration-based. Here are a few examples:
Here is an extremely useful resource for anyone interested in graphics and data visualization. Maarten Lambrechts is a data journalist, designer and visualization consultant from Belgium. He creates great visualizations and is a speaker and instructor (check out his free data journalism training videos in Learno.net).
He has compiled a List of 2017 data visualization lists, which links to the best work created in 2017 by many of the newspapers and organizations that are doing the best graphics. It’s great to see the work of the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Reuters, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and many others in one place. Luckily, more and more news organizations are presenting these compilations at the end of each year. They involve a lot of effort and quality journalism, and its great to discover those we missed when they were first published.
The list also includes examples made with tools like Tableau and Carto, charts from the World Bank, satellite imagery and a wonderful compilation of the best illustration published by The New York Times in 2017.
In the last year we have been working on multiple projects with UNICEF USA, including maps, graphics, style guides and reports. We recently worked on the infographics and charts for the 2017 Annual Report, as well as the Annual Report for UNICEF Kid Power. With a UNICEF Kid Power app or wrist band, kids transform their physical activity into lifesaving nutrition that UNICEF delivers to severely malnourished children around the world. (the UNICEF Kid Power Band was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ‘Best Inventions’ of 2016).
As we did in the 2016 Annual Report, we worked under the creative direction of UNICEF’s Anna Christian to create a series of simple, bold data and information visual summaries.
UNICEF USA helps save and protect the world’s most vulnerable children. Rated one of the best charities to donate to, 90% of every dollar spent goes directly to help children. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is a United Nations programme that provides humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries.
I’ll be in India on December 12-20 teaching workshops for local newspapers and journalists, organized by WAN-IFRA (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers). This is the schedule:
December 13, Bangalore: One-day print infographics for Prajavani (Kannada language daily newspaper) and Deccan Herald (English daily).
December 14-15, Hyderabad: Two-day public workshop on infographics and data visualization (one day print, one day online).
December 16, 17, and 19, Kottayam (Kerala state): Three-day workshop with two days of online infographics and one day of print infographics for Malayala Manorama Daily (Malayalam language newspaper), The Week (English language magazine) and Manorama online (online portal).
I’m looking forward to look at the quickly changing landscape of Indian infographics after my previous workshops in India almost three years ago.
The Zoomable Universe is a new book by Caleb Scharf, the Director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center and an award-winning author of Astronomy books. We were lucky to create all the infographics in the book, which is a new take on the Powers of Ten idea. The book is a tour through all known scales of reality, beginning at the limits of the observable universe and ending in the subatomic realm. The book is packed with our infographics and also illustrations by RonMiller, famous for his space art at publications like National Geographic and Scientific American.
The Zoomable Universe is published by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Here are some of our graphics in the book.
The Data Viz Project is a new online catalog of different types of charts created by Ferdio, an infographics studio in Denmark. It’s a useful resource to help decide appropriate types of visualization for any given dataset (another thing is to decide which one will be the most insightful and revealing when you have multiple options). You can view and sort by type, function or shape.
Each type of chart includes a description, a good gallery of real-life examples, and a very simple description of the type of data input needed to create that type of chat, in a table format (what you would input in Excel, for instance).
The Data Viz Project is the latest of many efforts to classify and catalog different ways of visualizing data. Another excellent online resource is the Data Visualization Catalogue, developed by Severino Ribecca, which we often show in our workshops.
Ribecca teamed up with Jon Schwabish in another project to create the Graphic Continuum, a nicely designedposter taxonomy of different types of charts, and how they all relate to each other. You can read more about it here.
And here is yet another similar effort by Andrew Abela, which shows different possibilities depending on your purpose when showing the data.
Here is one by Anna Vital that is not strictly about charts but is interesting because it looks at visual analogies and metaphors that can help us think of ideas to visualize information.
If you are looking for a truly comprehensive reference guide on different types of visualization with charts and maps, our hands-down favorite is still the book Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference, by Robert L. Harris. The 450-pages book is a massive reference encyclopedia with hundreds of entries, examples and cross-references about different chart, map and diagram types, as well as statistical and visualization methods. The latest edition is from 2000 but it’s still the “Bible” of reference on visualization.
We recently finished a nice project designing the infographics and charts for the 2016 Annual Report of UNICEF USA. We worked under the creative direction of UNICEF’s Anna Christian to create a series of simple, bold data and information visual summaries.
UNICEF USA helps save and protect the world’s most vulnerable children. Rated one of the best charities to donate to, 90% of every dollar spent goes directly to help children. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is a United Nations programme that provides humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries.
The winners of the Malofiej Awards were announced a couple of weeks ago. The Malofiej Summit is held every year in Pamplona (Spain) and is still, in my opinion, the best event in the world if you want to know what is happening in the field of information graphics and data visualization. Since they are for the most part journalistic work, the graphics have a strong focused on being clear, explanatory and insightful to clarify news events. They are the “Pulitzer of Infographics”. It includes the competition of print and online infographics (over 1300 entries from 134 organizations in 31 countries participated), a 2-day conference that attracts professionals from all over the world and a three-day workshop called “Show Don’t Tell”. The workshop for professionals is taught by Fernando Baptista of National Geographic, Xaquín Gonzalez from The Guardian and John Grimwade from the University of Ohio. It doesn’t get any better than that! I was fortunate to be an instructor for the workshop for 10 years.
This year there was also a workshop for students, taught by Michael Stoll, Professor of the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences.
There is a special bonus from Malofiej. Every year they publish a fantastic book with all the award winners. There is no better source of inspiration for print and online infographics and to see the state of the art, trends and work from different countries.
This year the top prizes (Best of Show) went to Corriere della Sera (Italy) and The New York Times (USA), for the print and online categories respectively, with the graphics ‘Journey of Foreign Fighters’ (shown below) and ‘Olympic Races Social Series’.
Over the years, we at 5W have been lucky to win a few Malofiej Awards (from our previous jobs at the NY Times, National Geographic, Fortune or directly with 5W’s work. Here is my Terracotta Warriors graphic for National Geographic (in collaboration with Pure Rendering GmbH) that won the Best of Show a few years back:
By the way, everybody asks this: what does Malofiej mean? Alejandro Malofiej was an Argentinian cartographer considered to be a pioneer in infographics, who died in 1987. The event was named after him as a tribute. The 25th anniversary is an important milestone. Here is a video tribute to Javier Errea, the President of the Spanish Chapter of SND, who has been the head of Malofiej for the last 17 years. A well deserved recognition!
When it comes to create data-driven interactive infographics, charts and maps for the web our tool of choice is D3. This JavaScript library can connect data to graphic elements in the page and create data-driven, dynamic transformations for them. The possibilities are enormous. D3 was created by Mike Bostock, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Until 2015 he was also working at The New York Times creating some of the best interactive graphics out there. According to Martin Velasco, our Director of Web Development, “D3 is possibly the most powerful and flexible tool out there for creating sleek and precise data visualizations for the web. We really enjoy working with it”.
During the last few months we had the opportunity to experience once again the power of D3 while developing several graphics for Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C. that do research on economics and social policy. One of the more interesting is this data-intensive electoral map that connects the recent election of Donald Trump to several social indicators of financial insecurity. It is truly remarkable how D3 allows you to work with massive amounts of data (about 50,000 in this case) and transform them into beautiful rich, smooth-moving graphics. We are looking forward to more D3 work.
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