October 9, 2017
Makeover Monday: Adult Obesity in the United States
What works well?
- Simple title that tells me what the viz is showing
- Pulling the smaller States out separately to ensure they don't get lost due to their size
- Creating an inlay for Alaska and Hawaii
- Including a definite for obese
- Great filter action on the regions
- Everyone understands maps!
- Nice highlight action to show the State on the line chart and vice versa
- Great tooltips on the line chart
- Keeping all lines on the line chart and highlighting the selected State
- Keeping the scale on the line chart at the appropriate intervals
- Using colors that people typically will identify with good and bad
What could be improved?
- You lose the sense of change in the map.
- The height and width of the line chart seem odd. It's too tall for my liking. This accentuates the vertical change.
- There's no real story to the data. A more impactful title that has a definitive statement would help keep me there longer.
My Goals
- Create something engaging. I'm going to see if something like Michael Mixon's tilemap birth rates chart works well with this data set.
- If that doesn't work, make something that shows comparisons well.
- Make sure States are easily comparable.
- Give States even weight in the viz.
- Keep the highlighting by obesity rate and filtering by region from the original.
- Make nice tooltips like the original.
- Look for stories in the different demographics.
- Learn something new!
- Have fun at Makeover Monday Live!
January 29, 2013
Alberto Cairo: Three steps to become a visualization/infographics designer (a Tableau version)
Two weeks ago, we had the huge honor of hosting Alberto Cairo at Facebook for our monthly Data Visualization Meet-up. And wow was his presentation incredible! People are still buzzing about it.
Alberto did a wonderful job of taking us through the decision making processes he’s gone through during his years of creating visualizations and infographics for many media organizations. One in particular that caught my attention was how he came about creating the cover for his book “the functional art”.
Alberto walked us through the iterative approach he took to end up with the slope graph on the cover. He sent me the data (which you can download here) so that I could emulate the design process in Tableau. Using the “Next” buttons, you can navigate through his approach to see the story unfold.
