Month: January 2016

Jason posted yet another awesome edition of the Naked Data newsletter (which you should all definitely be reading). In this particular issue (#75) there is article entitled: Automatically generate beautiful visualisations from your data. Although there is a lot of snark in that title, the author is basically saying that good data visualisation is difficult and requires someone with training and experience if you want a decent end product. Continue reading “The Wedding Photographer Problem”

Since we are still in the grips of Star Wars frenzy (and the various problems in the world that need solving will still be there in tomorrow), Bloomberg created an infographic showing the use of the Force across all 7 Star Wars films. I like the adherence to the colour scheme and, since the data doesn’t actually matter, this if form over function that works well.

When creating a data visualisation, one the worst ways to encode the differences between values is to use changes in colour. Whether going from light to dark or changing between two colours, our brains are not particularly good at determining how big the difference is and for small differences, we may not notice it at all. Continue reading “Colour Palettes for Data Visualizations”