Today I read about a new data set on Berlin’s quite new Open Data website. It was titled »Migration to and from Berlin« and made me very curious. I keep hearing that the city’s population is shrinking, but doubt that. After downloading the data, I opened it in Numbers and made a first quick graph. I was surprised—not because it showed that for a few years already, there are more people moving to Berlin than from it—but because my brain yelled: “William Playfair”! And sure enough, this is the quite well-known vintage infographic that I had in mind. With Numbers’ on-board tools, I then quickly tried to match the visual style of the chart with the one by William Playfair. Here’s a PDF. What do you think?

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) published an infographic in their customer magazine, which was made by Golden Section Graphics. For this, I programmed two small applications: one converted a world map into a differently projected one (Fuller Projection). The other one generated te surrounding triangles for any countries of the world and the included bar charts. The represented values are specific indexes for the nation’s sustainability.

First, the whole thing is a poster. But one should really cut the world map out and glue the edges together, because you get a very nice paper globe! Read more on the fibonacciLAB website.

On December 30, 2009, the German daily economy newspaper »Handelsblatt« published five unusual looking infographics made by Jan Schwochow (head of Golden Section Graphics) and me. Since it was the end of the year, the graphics were about numbers of last year’s/decade’s finances and some outlooks on this year/decade. Also, the title page featured a mashup of those single graphics.

The people at »Handelsblatt« had quite some chutzpah letting us go nuts with the mostly quite small data sets and the disproportionately generous space!

Read more about it on Golden Section Graphics Blog (in German).

Comparing numerical values by illustrating them as shapes, especially circles, needs to be done with the area in mind, not only a one-dimensional value that defines this shape. A circle is drawn with a radius, so another circle depicting a multiple of the value the first one is representing may not only have this multiple radius. It should have the corresponding area.

Another more extreme example showing how a circle with 25 times the radius can’t be a symbol for 25 times the size: