One of the best way to learn new things is through imitation.
Learning to play an instrument? Copy what your teacher does!
Learning to paint? Try painting in the style of a famous artist.
Learning to dance? Watch some videos on YouTube and attempt to replicate it in the comfort of your home.
That’s why, as I’m trying to become better at infographics, I really appreciate Nathan Yau’s guides over at FlowingData.com. Recently he had a great guide on how to create a ‘treemap’. I used slightly different variables (blog title, category, visitor time per post) and ended up with the following:
I’ve come across a wealth of fantastic infographics blogs recently. One of the best, and which has a community element is Flowing Data maintained by Nathan Yau, an UCLA PhD candidate. Nathan runs regular Visualize This competitions, the latest of which (closes 24 November 2009) compares teacher/student ratio with SAT scores by State.
The hardest bit, I’ve found, of creating an infographic is (perhaps obviously) working out how to visualize the data in a meaningful way. The problem with the raw data presented in this competition was that there were 3 SAT scores (reading, maths, writing) and that a meaningful correlation would assume an inverse relationship between this and teacher/student ratio.
In other words I had to figure out a way of plotting something increasing whilst the other decreased.
After a bit of playing around fruitlessly, I settled on the infographic at the top of this post. I’ve a few days left to change it a bit if necessary, but I think that it does, on the whole, do what’s required of it.
I’m never going to win the competition (a copy of David McCandless’ The Visual Miscellaneum) but, like entering a half-marathon or a 5k to focus your running routine, it’s still worth doing! 😀
