Thursday, 5 June 2008

Great piece of information design

Everyone and their second cousin (twice removed) are talking about electorate demographics at the moment. The NY Times cooked up this tidy little graphic that visualizes this better than I've seen yet...


video

Much too much has been made of individual slices... "Hillary is doing well with middle-income non-college graduates with three+ kids and SUVs". To focus on an individual 'slice' like this is to miss the wood for the trees. It's similar to the mindset we get into when we over-think the 'page-level' in site design and miss the user flow. By animating the demographics, as the NY times has done, you get a feel for the overall shape of the electorate: much more illuminating than any slice.

PS: not such a fan of the embedded video player? Click here for a quicktime movie instead

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