Aleks points us to this page by Mindy McAdams with 21 examples of graphics made using Adobe Flash. (I guess this is a computer language? Or a computer package? I’m not actually sure what the distinction is between these concepts.)
They’re mostly excellent: functional and attractive without being too, well, flashy. I like them much more than the so-called “5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year.”
My only complaint is that there are no blank spaces or divisions between the examples. I was having difficulty remembering that the description of each item went below the display, not above. A minor point, but one that I think about a lot because I often make graphs with small multiples, and it’s important to be able to know which is which. If I could convey this one little point to the data visualization pros, I’d have done something useful today.
P.S. to Aleks: Next time you can just blog this sort of thing yourself directly; no need to have me as a middleman!
P.P.S. Link above fixed. (I bet Aleks would’ve done it right the first time.)
No link at the moment. This page?
So I'm guessing you wanted a link to http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2010/21-examples-of… in your post?
To cover the parenthetical, flash is a platform/runtime that lets one run flash programs. Flash programs ("movies", which are distinct from "flash videos") are typically created with a combination of traditional programming language (actionscript, which is a variant of javascript) and direct manipulation of graphics, often in a program that is also called flash ("Adobe Flash CS4 Professional", at the moment).
Whether programmed interactions that are created visually in such fashions constitute using a "programming language" is not well settled. The flash "movie" is definitely a program that runs in a programming runtime, though.
i can't see half of 'em through the jpg artifacts. sigh.
Wow, I missed the budget forecast graphic, and it's both fantastic and deeply disturbing.
I don't know much about budget forecasting, but it looks to me like all forecasts point up at roughly the same slope, after maybe a short decline (the most recent projections are the exception, pointing up at a more rapid pace).
How are these incredibly important forecasts seen as credible in light of their historical performance? To the untrained eye, it just looks like blind optimism with no track record of success. Am I missing something?
The Debt Trap example is pretty bad, because it compares a stock (debt, $) with a flow (annual savings, $/yr) on essentially the same axis.