Find color schemes for data visualization.

Color advice for photography.

I have prepared dozens of charts & graphs looking at every aspect of global warming that I could. My early Excel based analysis is here. My more recent R based analysis is here. I have used publicly available data sources to reach my own conclusions. I provide the data links and my R script for each chart/ graph so that interested readers can confirm my work for themselves.

Here's a quick summary of my evidence for global warming.

In February 2008, the New York Times published an unusual chart of box office revenues for 7500 movies over 21 years. The chart was based on a similar visualization, developed by the first author, that displayed trends in music listening. This paper describes the design decisions and algorithms behind these graphics, and discusses the reaction on the Web. We suggest that this type of complex layered graph is effective for displaying large data sets to a mass audience. We provide a mathematical analysis of how this layered graph relates to traditional stacked graphs and to techniques such as ThemeRiver, showing how each method is optimizing a different “energy function”. Finally, we discuss techniques for coloring and ordering the layers of such graphs. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the interplay between considerations of aesthetics and legibility.

Flickr Flow is an experiment whose materials are color and time.
We first used this technique in a Boston Magazine piece, Flickr of Hope, that appeared in March 2009.

The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image below is an early sketch from the piece. Summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise.

The dygraphs JavaScript library produces produces interactive, zoomable charts of time series. It is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them.

Track how millions of fans interact with online music everyday.

The Web Trend Map community curates meaningful link trends by choosing sources they trust.

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans." Matt Woolman Digital Information Graphics Goal VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field. As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.

Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.

Slate's Moneybox has an interactive map that shows job creation and loss throughout the US for the past two years. Watching it flow through each month's up and down definitely made the employment situation in the country clearer to me. Like any great visualization image and the legend make it very clear what's happening.

The classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables. Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays.

This website is part of the Master's thesis The Form of Facts and Figures, developed by Christian Behrens in the Interface Design program at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. Its goal is the development of a design pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design.

An Introduction to Information Design

Today's consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new "visual scientists" who are turning bits and bytes of data -- once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders -- into stories for our digital age.

Simon Rogers gathers some of the key figures driving the political agenda in the United States. Download the data or access the API to build your own charts and visualizations.

WattzOn gives you tools to track your energy consumption, compare it to others' and understand its consequences in order to discover how to reduce your role in climate change.

MindNode Pro is an elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for the Macintosh. It was created with the user in mind and features a very simple and intuitive user interface that lets the user focus on expressing and developing ideas. Nearly no time is required to learn the interface.

Some of the (..) ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT.

GrandPerspective is a small utility application for Mac OS X that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. It can help you to manage your disk, as you can easily spot which files and folders take up the most space. It uses a so called tree map for visualisation. Each file is shown as a rectangle with an area proportional to the file's size.

lifemetric is a social experiment that aims to track the factors of our lives that shape our society.

Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good quality sleep? How many steps and miles did I walk today? The Fitbit Tracker helps you answer these questions.

MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. This common practice is contrary to the public interest, yet legal. MAPLight.org makes money/vote connections transparent, to help citizens hold their legislators accountable.

Overzicht van de sociale webdiensten per productcategorie, in een prisma.

Yesterday at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog Jim Bumgardner, a front-end engineer and “Yahoo! Music Nerd,” announced the release of the Yahoo! Music API:

Follow the Oil Money is an interactive tool that tracks the flow of oil money in US politics.

We are excited to announce that we are opening up the Google Visualization API beyond Google Spreadsheets and adding more capabilities for developers. Earlier at the Google I/O developer conference, we launched several new features of the Google Visualiza

The Work of Jonathan Harris

Twistori filters Twitter posts around "I love", "I hate", "I think", "I believe", "I feel", "I wish".

Het CBS heeft veel gegevens op regionaal niveau. Die zijn al lange tijd beschikbaar via de statistische database Statline. Cartografische systemen geven de mogelijkheid de regionale gegevens ook op een meer aantrekkelijke manier te presenteren. Daarvoor h

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. Photos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing a

An intuitive search assistant for Amazon, Ebay, YouTube and Flickr

Gapminder turns boring statistics into something new and interesting, using visualizations and animateions. The Gapminder Goal: enable you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics.

"Breathing Earth is a visual, real-time simulation of the CO2 emission rates, birth rates and death rates of every country in the world."