Fresh Pulp (nerd edition) >> We Love DataVis Blog

I think clever infographics can be functional design at its best...  Communicating statistics or messages clearly and simply in a visual medium, and then even making it look pretty, is not actually a simple task.

Here, a few great ones from the We Love Datavis (data visualization) blog, which keeps track of the latest and greatest infographics.  I swear it's not as nerdy as it sounds.

Who can resist a great flow chart?

 And maybe the only thing better than a flow chart is a really good Venn diagram...

Below is an example of a more technical infographic gone wrong.  This graphic was generated by a consulting firm for the US Army, and it is meant to show the complexity of the military strategy in Afghanistan to Gen. Stanley McChrystal.  

As it turns out, all it shows is that the strategy is so complex that no one can understand it.  (NYT article about this here.)

I particularly appreciate when people with this sort of visualization skill put their efforts into something fairly useless...  The below graphic shows the evolution of crayola color choices from 1903 to the present.  

Maybe working on "fluff pieces" like this is like the guilty pleasure of infographics people?  

They're like, "What data, if arranged into a graphic, will just look really pretty?" ... "I know, crayola colors over time!"

This is an amazing example of a totally useless, and yet totally awesome infographic.

On a continuum, the pierceived trustworthiness of beard types.  (Click image for larger version, then click it again to zoom.)

This is pretty entertaining... We all know about the "Missed Connections" section on Craiglist (I happen to love it), and this graphic shows the most commonly listed locations people give for where the missed connection happened, by state.

The geographic variation between places like gyms vs coffee places vs Walmarts is pretty interesting!

Map by A Very Small Array