The New York Times now has a web Flash player Before we had D3 and all this fancy web technology, interactive news pieces on the web were usually built using Adobe Flash. Some of my favorite news graphics are from that era, and when I talk about them I like to joke that they're so old they were done in Flash (a joke that dates me as much as it dates these news graphics)! The problem is that Flash, while ubiquitous in the early 2000s, was deprecated in 2017. That unfortunately means that they are all but inaccessible now, because no current browser includes Flash, and the workarounds I've tri ..read more

EagerEyes Turns 15 ​ EagerEyes is 15 years old today! Rather than look back at 15 years of visualization and blogging (though I will do a little of that too), I want to reflect a bit on what blogging means today and where things are going. Blogging Is Over ​ It would be easy to think that blogs are old-school and nobody pays attention to them anymore. I don't think that's true, but they certainly have a lot more competition today. There's the well-established social media like Facebook and Twitter, there's the newer ones like TikTok, SnapChat, Clubhouse ..read more

New Video: Linear vs. Quadratic Change ​ Scaling objects to represent a value is a key part of visualization, but it's not without its pitfalls. Especially when it comes to fancy infographic bar charts, it can easily distort the value's appearance. Why that is, and where else this can happen, isn't always obvious. In my new video, I show how it happens and how to do it right – and how this issue inspired ISOTYPE. This is essentially the video version of a blog post I wrote on linear vs. quadratic change some 12 yers ago. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic reminded me of it in a Clubhou ..read more

Rainbow colormaps are among the most derided ideas in data visualization, second only to pie charts. And yet, people use them. Why? A recent paper looks at some of the reasons why they are so popular and points to research showing that they might not be so bad if used for the right tasks. There’s even opportunity for interesting research in rainbow colormaps! Finger-wagging about rainbow colormaps is a pretty common pastime in visualization, I’ve done it too! And it’s not like there aren’t good reasons. Look at this map of maximum temperatures in the US, published by NOAA, for example: The r ..read more

I’m teaching a short course on data visualization for Observable. It’s free, and you should join! Starts March 7. The course will cover the fundamentals of data visualization, like the key chart types, how they work, when and how to use them. We’ll also talk about transformations of data, like binning and smoothing data, and of course interaction. We’ll use Observable’s Plot library for the most part, plus a bit of D3. The focus will not be on the tools however, but on the data visualization. If you don’t know JavaScript, you can brush up a bit by reading our Just Enough JavaScript intro and ..read more

This site has been around for over 16 years now, and a lot has changed in the world during that time. I’m currently working on an overhaul and wanted to give everybody an idea of what I’m thinking about and why there has been little activity. In light of recent developments, here are also some good ways to follow good old-fashioned blogs and an alternative to Twitter. Site Changes When I first started writing this post to go out on the actual birthday of the site, October 1, I was planning on turning it into a static site with no comments, but better organization and still an RSS feed that wo ..read more

Of the several AI-powered systems that can create images from text prompts, MidJourney is the most easily accessible one right now. I’ve had some fun playing with it, Midjourney produces images from prompts, which are basically text descriptions. They don’t have to be specific or concrete in any way. “Astronaut riding a horse in space” works just as well as abstract words. In fact, the latter can sometimes produce more interesting images. This post might not work very well in a feed reader, so maybe head to the web version. There, you can click on the little galleries to get much larger versi ..read more

Gauges aren’t very popular in visualization, but they have some interesting properties. There is, of course, the infamous NY Times “election needle,” but you’re probably using gauges every day without giving them too much thought. There’s also an interesting connection with circular bar charts, which I think can work well when used as part-to-whole charts. I talk about all of this in my new video. I really started thinking about this when I realized that gauges aren’t just displays of numbers, but also show you where you are on the scale. That’s quite useful when you’re trying to understand t ..read more

I gave a talk at the Outlier conference earlier this year, with the somewhat elaborate title, The Joys – and Dangers – of Bespoke and Unusual Chart Types. Though I eventually decided to go with the much shorter, This Should Have Been A Bar Chart! You can watch it on YouTube now. In the talk, I go through a number of examples, some of them recent, some of them a little older, of charts that are unusual in one way or another. These aren’t the kinds of charts that work for any old data, they’re often quite specific (or, bespoke) to the context and situation. And they don’t always show a lot of d ..read more

Encodings play a central role in visualization, but I believe our thinking about them is too simplistic. In a new paper, I argue that we need to distinguish between the encodings that specify how a visualization is drawn and the ones that are readable or actually read by an observer. While they largely or entirely overlap in some charts (like bar charts or scatterplots) they don’t in others (pie charts, line charts, etc.). And what exactly do you even specify in more complex visualizations like treemaps? Encodings are deceptively simple, once you’ve learned what they are. After all, they’re w ..read more