Makeover Monday: China is Dominating the Global Peach Index

This week's Makeover Monday was inspired by a typo in an email exchange with Andy and me. I had thought about doing the Global Peace Index this week, but accidentally typed "Peach" instead of Peace. Andy pointed it out to me, but then I thought, I wonder if there is a viz and data about global peach production.

And thanks to FAOSTAT there is! Who knew?!? Their data set is accompanied by a series of chart. I'm going to focus on their map.


What works well?

• It's a map, so I can easily understand that it's show geographic distribution.
• Nice filtering capabilities

Makeover Monday: Data breaches are getting bigger and more frequent

Several people have recommended Makeover Monday for the Project of the Year in the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, which I must admit is quite stunning and flattering at the same time. The suggestion for this week’s makeover came from Andy Cotgreave. We intentionally picked something from Information is Beautiful with the hope that it gets a bit more exposure. Shameless perhaps, but what can it hurt? This viz from David McCandless certainly deserves a makeover.

• The viz is eye-catching and definitely draws you in. There’s something to say for that.
• The interactivity is fantastic.
• Good filtering, colouring and sizing options

• The bubbles move all around for no apparent reason.
• There’s way too much overlapping, making it hard to identify any insights.
• Whether something is interesting is extremely subjective. I wouldn’t make these same choices.
• The viz doesn’t fit in a single view, requiring too much scrolling.
• Not all records are included. I guess this was done for artistic purposes as David is known to do, but it distorts the message.

Click to view interactive version

Tableau Tip Tuesday: How to Create a Combination Chart with Overlapping Bars & a Line

In this week’s tip, I look back at one of my most popular posts - 7 easy steps to create a combination chart with overlapping bars & a line. The tip hasn’t changed much, however, this time there’s a video.

Makeover Monday: Which shipping company really makes the most money?

This week’s Makeover Monday looks at the largest shipping container companies of 2016. The article includes this packed bubble chart:

What works well?

• It’s eye-catching and draws you in.
  
• The method for labelling ensures you only see the largest (as they names won’t fit otherwise).
• The color helps identify the largest companies.

What doesn’t work?

• Ranking is nearly impossible
  
• Are the depth of color and the size of the bubble for the same metric? The viz doesn’t tell us, so we’re left to guess.
• Is big good or bad?
• There’s no focus or context.

I started by changing it to a bar chart, but found that to be too boring, though effective. Then I saw an example by Shawn Levin which shows looks at the TEU per ship. That adds much more context to the visualisation. Shawn compared Total TEU to TEU per ship.

For me, I thought it was more meaningful to look at TEU per ship for both the total shipments and for the ships each company owns. This led me to the slope graph you see below which tells a much more meaningful story.

Tableau Tip Tuesday: Using a Level of Detail Expression to Summarize Dimensions

This week’s tip goes back to a tip I wrote in 2012 that required table calculations. With the addition of Level of Detail expressions in Tableau 9, the need for a table calc is obsolete.

Makeover Monday: Alan Rickman - An Actor’s Life

This week’s Makeover Monday subject was sent to me by incoming Data Schooler Anna Noble. Nothing like kissing up to the coach before you even start. 😋

The viz in question is from The Slow Journalism Company:

What works well?

• It’s obviously a timeline.
  
• It’s clearly about Alan Rickman.

What doesn’t work?

• It took me a while to figure out what the being on each side of the timeline meant.
  
• Horrific colour choices; apparently the colours identify the genre. You can see that in the microscopic font on the lower left.
• Colours with zig zagged lines are always a bad choice
• The pointy things
• The pie chart
• The annotations aren’t near the data they represent.
• You have to use the zoom feature to read anything.
• It makes me dizzy.

For my makeover, I wanted to do something very simple. This data set calls out for something simple and clear, especially after you spend time trying to understand the original. I have no idea who Alan Rickman is as I’ve never read any Harry Potter books nor seen the movies. Yes, I’m a terrible father! I once again used 100% floating objects to create this. I’m really loving the precise control that lets me have.

Click on the image for the interactive version (but really there’s no need as there nothing more to the live version other than a mobile view).

The Toxic Twenty Five: An Analysis of Southern California Air Quality

This week I challenged The Data Duo to a #VizOff of sorts. I provided them with a data set of 8.5M ozone level readings from stations spread all throughout the U.S. I started looking at this data a few weeks ago because I was thinking about the smog in Atlanta and wondering if it had gotten any better since I left. This led me to the master data set or all cities that are measured.

Once I started exploring the data, I noticed that Southern California consistently had the most cities with high ozone levels. So I filtered the data set down to the 25 worst cities.

This helped me focus on a single story with multiple parts, as seen in the long-form visualisation below. Enjoy!