Blog

A tough week for me with a hectic work week and a struggle for #MakeoverMonday inspiration. The aim was to makeover this Myers Briggs chart. I like the 4×4 grid representation of the original as we are basically looking at a mix of four attributes. I don’t really get a sense of the percentages / proportions though as every segment of the grid is the same size. I also had to flick back and forth between another page on the site to get a more detailed explanation of what the letters mean. ...

Making over a table of Formula E racing results from the FIA Formula E website this week. I was interested in how drivers progressed from practice to qualification so went with a bump chart. I’ve highlighted the winner but dashboard actions also allow the user to highlight the driver that they are hovering over. This way they can see how each driver’s performance changes during an event because the bump chart is quite hard to follow otherwise. ...

Just a brief write up for now! Andy and Eva chose charts relating to adult obesity in America for the 41st makeover with the source data coming from the CDC. The original charts are part of an interactive dashboard and it is well worth checking out. Similarly to Klaus Schulte I decided to dig into gender differences. Klaus’s makeover is very nice so definitely go take a look at that. ...

This week was a makeover of a Financial Times article on the UK economy since the Brexit referendum using data from the OECD. The original Makeover I’ve gone with three key elements in my makeover: Retain the line chart and highlighting of the UK, but show a wider period of time and highlight the referendum date Show the range of growth across the G7 without showing too many lines. Instead allow the user to choose which G7 country to compare to Provide a ranking table to highlight the low ranking for the UK in the last two quarters The viz is also available on Tableau Public. ...

In August 2016 Nielson released a report what’s in our food and on our mind. Page 8 of the report included a set of spiral bar charts showing restricted dietary requirements around the world: The charts on this page were chosen for week 39 of Makeover Monday. Whilst the infographic is visually engaging I’m not a big fan of the spiral bars. That and the way the different diets are laid out makes it quite hard to visually compare various categories (e.g. low sodium to vegetarian). ...

A day at the races! This week we got a wealth of Strava data from Andy and Eva across two recent events that they have competed in. Find out more here. You’ll see that they each had a set of questions for the community to consider. I was busy trying to reproduce some of the graphs I’ve seen produced from sports watch / trackers and got very bogged down in the data. A quick look at the submissions that were coming through on twitter showed me that those submitting were focussing on a subset of the questions and only tackling one person’s data. Phew – it was good to take a step back! Eva’s question about the second kilometer of the run intrigued me. Friends that participate in triathlons have mentioned the initial pain over the first 500 meters but I hadn’t picked up on a lull after the first 1000 meters. ...

For week 37 of Makeover Monday we’re looking at UK bicycle thefts based on data from data.police.uk. The reference site linked above has pretty extensive visualisations and I love the way they unfold as you work your way through the site. I’m not going to try to improve upon the site, instead I’m looking for a different angle to show and, given the bleakness of the data (less than 1% of bike thefts resolved!), it’s an opportunity to try a paired back black and white viz. ...

The UN, #MakeoverMonday and #VizForSocialGood came together to challenge the data visualisation community to visualise results from the MYWorld survey on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. You can read more about the challenge on the Makeover Monday blog. The design is geared towards a tablet as there were indications that the UN would like to use the finished viz on stands with tablets at various UN events like the forthcoming UN General Assembly in New York. ...

A quick post for Makeover Monday this week. We had data on NFL player arrests from 2000 to August 2017 with the aim to makeover the interactive visualisation here. Whilst exploring the data I was interested to see the free text outcome data. After grouping this I was surprised to see that the proportion of guilty outcomes seemed to be reducing over time whilst the proportion with an undetermined outcome was increasing . In hindsight you’d expect more recent cases to not yet be determined – perhaps they haven’t yet worked through the system? Still I suspect that there is a story here. Of course that story may not be specific to NFL player arrests and I haven’t checked for similar stats across the wider population. ...

So apparently there was a pretty exciting solar eclipse this week. I guess that’s why Eva picked a NASA data set on solar eclipses for Makeover Monday! Go check out the original article as it’s got a great map of eclipse paths. The data we got for our makeover didn’t include paths, instead it included one coordinate for each eclipse over 5 millennia along with data on the type and duration. Still, the community produced some amazing and informative visualisations. ...