He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.

(They’ve run the image a bit small. Here’s a hi-res on my Flickr)

Here’s the data http://bit.ly/polldancing too. It has a load of extra info going back to 1987.

Happy voting!

This infographic for the Guardian datablog visualizes measures suggested by the parties to plug the enormous black hole in the UK’s finances. That deficit currently totals £167bn ($255bn) – more than the £152 bn ($237bn) the UK government earns from income tax every year.

See the graphic
Explore more detail, data and sources here: http://bit.ly/dotheycutit

What colour is happiness in China? Or good luck in Africa? Or anger in Eastern Europe? Are any colour meanings universal across cultures and continents?

A visualisation of the meanings of different colours in different cultures by David McCandless and AlwaysWithHonor.com.

• EXTRA A short photo story about how a version of this image ended up as the 91st and final cover design of our book, Information is Beautiful. Yes, 91 versions!
• HELP We’ve painted with a pretty broad brush. So there’s likely to be local variations or glitches. So if you spot any, or have you have references and sources for other colour meanings around the world, please send them over or comment below.

If you like this image, you can order an amazing full-colour print of it.

A visual map of the arguments for and against human-caused global climate change.

I’m fascinated by climate deniers. How could anyone deny the climate change is happening?
What evidence is there? Surely it’s unambiguous?

Curious, I investigated the key statements made by climate denialists and sought out the counter-views, as presented by climate research scientists. The result is this image.

(This a new and updated version of the spread on Climate Skepticism from my book The Visual Miscellaneum)

Method

I researched this subject in a very particular way. I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources.

Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online.

My conclusion is “what a nightmare”. I was generally shocked and appalled by how difficult it was to source counter arguments. The data was often tucked away on extremely ancient or byzantine websites. The key counter arguments I often found, 16 scrolls down, on comment 342 on a far flung realclimate.org post from three years ago. And even when I found an answer, the answers were excessively jargonized or technical.

Most of the info for this image is sourced from Realclimate.org. It’s an amazing blog staffed tirelessly by some of the world’s leading climatologists.

Unfortunately, the majority of the writing on there is so scientific and so technical, it makes the website nigh on useless to the casual, curious reader.

This has got to be one of the reasons why scientists and leaders are struggling to convince sections of the populace that the threat of climate change is real. Because they’re doing such a terrible job explaining it.

(Saying all that, I would like to express my gratitude to Gavin A Schmidt, one of unsung heroes of the web IMHO. His sterling and patient replies to comments, on RealClimate.org in understandable English, have really helped this process.)

Runaway Feedback

This image was a mammoth undertaking, especially for someone like me, unschooled in climate science. So I appreciate your understanding if any errors have crept into the process. If you spot any, please get in touch and I’ll will correct them on the double.

In every case, wherever possible, I went back the original data. (I’ve included a ZIP of all the data I’ve collected plus a spreadsheet of all the sources). And all the graphs in the image are generated from the original temperature records and other data sources. Feel free to rifle through and check everything.

RealClimate.org are (now) keeping an archive of all the data – if you want even more!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

UPDATE 1 (12th Dec 09): There have been a few complaints about the legibility of the image. So I’ve created a version on white instead of black.

NEW: Limited edition signed prints of this image now available in our poster shop.

A concept-map exploring the Left vs Right political spectrum. A collaboration between David McCandless and information artist Stefanie Posavec, taken from my book The Visual Miscellaneum (out Nov 10th).

Of course, the political spectrum is not quite so polarised. Actually, it’s more of a diamond shape, apparently. But this is how it’s mostly presented via the media – left wing vs. right wing, liberal vs. conservative, Labour vs Tory. And perhaps in our minds too…

Well, certainly in my mind. Researching this showed me that, despite my inevitable journalistic lean to the ‘left’, I am actually a bit more ‘right’ than I suspected.

This kind of visual approach to mapping concepts really excites me. I like the way it coaxes me to entertain two apparently contradictory value systems at the same time. Or, in other words, I like the way it f**ks with my head.

I’ve got a few more of these coming from my book. They do a similar act of mind-flossing. Stay tuned.

Oh and if there’s enough demand, we’re going to do a signed, limited edition poster run of this image before Christmas. Email informationisbeautiful [at] gmail [dot] com if you’re interested

design notes

The original design concept was “something like a rosette”. But Stefanie did an amazing job taking it way further.

(I’ll be doing a ‘Great Visualizers’ piece on her in the future. But you can see some of her work here: itsbeenreal.co.uk. My particular favourite are her literary organisms. Truly beautiful and very informational. Yum.)

There are two versions with different colours: a US and a World version. This is because the US and Switzerland are the only countries in the world where red = right wing and blue = left wing. Grrr!

Is the US about to face a pandemic?

The USA still has the most cases in the world. The America media are starting to pump out alarming headlines. “200,000 deaths!”. Here are the current figures.

But when you factor in population sizes, the USA disappears off the map. (It’s actually 15th in the world)

Fatality rates: Is Swine Flu getting deadlier?

When you look at fatality rates for Swine Flu, the percentage of infected people who die, the results are depressingly unsurprising.

Although these nations have much fewer cases than Western nations, far more people are dying. Brazil’s fatality rate is a shocking 10%, against a world-wide average of around 0.3-0.5%.

When you compare these worldwide fatality rates against those from mid-July, you see a slightly worrying trend.

Swine Flu appears to be becoming more deadly in Latin America. Is this down to Western nations use of Tamiflu?

Swine Flu Advisory

Here’s the overall data in a table. Media reporting generally only focuses on the first column. But we think the other columns are more relevant.

The stand-out statistic from all this is the US’s death rate at 1.2%. It’s the only Western nation in the above-average rankings.

This may be down to Swine Flu’s particularly lethal interaction with obesity. An estimated 34% of American’s are obese (CDC)

If you are interested in more, you can see a live interactive table of Swine Flu figures here.
Sources and data in this Google Doc.

Billions spent on this. Billions spent on that. What does it all look like? Hopefully The Billion Dollar Gram will help.

This image arose out of a frustration with the reporting of billion dollar amounts in the media. That is, they’re reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context. But they can start to be understood visually and relatively, IMHO.

(This is one of the first images I created for my book. So a lot of the figures are from 2006/07. I’ve also visually cheated slightly here and there to make everything fit)

I hoping this will be a “living image” that I’ll keep updating all the time. So if you find any interesting, juicy or eye-popping billions, please comment below (with a source). Let’s see how high we can make this image!

Off the back of the recent timeline of global media scare stories, I got curious about what searches actually look like.

For example, the search “violent video games” reveals a very distinct pattern.

Why that distinct pattern? If you add the dates, it clarifies things:

Every April and November the issue flares up. Why?

April 20th is the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre. Though dimishing, the echoes of that event still reverberate through the group mind.

Not sure about the November peak? Maybe because Christmas video games are announced?

Face Off

A cool thing about Insights. You can pile multiple search terms into the interface and force them into a face off. A bit like putting a fly and a spider and an earwig in a bottle. You’ve done that, right?

I like this one for putting the Twitter hype in perspective.

It’s also good for the settling of age old conflicts.

(Though, technically, the results for ‘apple’ might get some noise for people searching for the popular fruit online)

Why those big peaks?

Hahah. Brilliant. Those peaks occur at the height of summer in July. Though there was a considerable dip in 2007. Bad summer then? Maybe we could map these to global temperatures to make a more human (and tasty) barometer of weather fluctuations. Maybe future super-ironic generations will use searches for “ice cream” as climate records?

ANYWAY. Insights a great fun tool for scoping patterns in data or to rate preferencess – or even to help with personal decisions.

Have a play. Let me know any cool stuff you come up with.

Watch out! A timeline of global media scare stories.