More data visualisation

More on one of my favourite topics at the moment – data visualisation.

Smashing Magazine – An excellent article discussing and demonstrating modern approaches to data visualisation. I’ve come across Mindmaps before and they are very intuitive. Newsmaps are a variation of heatmaps which I’ve blogged about before. These show different size boxes relating to a news item depending on the items populatrity.

Heat Maps – Smartmoney magazine have put together an excellent implemention of heat maps. This links shows a heat map of stock market companies and how they are performing today. Grouped into their respective categories, this map presents to the user a high level overview of how the market is doing, how specific sectors are doing, and how individual companies are doing. Unfortunately, if you look at it today (16th September 2008) it will be a sea of red due to recent market events. However, an excellent implementation of heat maps.

Olympic Medals – The New York Times presents an interesting graphical representation of the medals won at Olympics games, dating back to 1896. Use the slider at the top of the graphic to show the trend. The size of the circle is determined by the number of medals won. If you click on a circle, you can see who won those medals. Nice.

Sparklines

Following on from a recent post about dashboard design, you must take a look at Bissantz’s Sparklines.

I am amazed at how much meaningful information can be displayed in such a small footprint.

Bonavista Systems have also implemented their own version of Sparklines and have integrated Stephen Few’s bullet graphs. They have called their product Micro Charts.

Sparklines are based on works by Edward Tufte. Edward has written a highly regarded book in the area around visual presentation of data called Beautiful Evidence.

One for the wish list.