Week 47: Snapchat is Tops with American Teens

We’re almost there everyone! 47 weeks down, five to go! Keep up the amazing work! This week we tried to get inside the brains of American teens by analysing their favorite social networks over the past three years. The data set contained only 24 records, which presents a pretty different challenge to some weeks in the past. We often hear of people struggling with big data, but for me, analyzing tiny data can be super tough.

LESSON 1: USING TEXT AS A COLOR LEGEND

Including the default color legend in your dashboards that pop in by default can be the easy way out. If you want to start working on more minimalist designs, consider incorporating your legend into the title, subtitle or descriptions. As an example, consider this viz by Colin Wojtowycz.

Notice how Colin has incorporated the color legends into the text of the title. This removes the next for extra elements on your visual, reduces clutter, and makes for an overall more visually appealing piece.

LESSON 2: DATA-TO-INK RATIO

Edward Tufte came up with the concept of the data-to-ink ratio.

The data-to-ink ratio is the proportion of ink that is used to present actual data compared to the total amount of ink (or pixels) used in the entire display. (Ratio of Data-Ink to non-Data-Ink).

Another way to think of this is as unnecessary decoration, including bling that doesn’t add anything to your story and often detracts from it. In this week in Makeover Monday Viz Review, we critiqued this viz by Nish Goel‏:

Nish has been very active with MM recently and his enthusiasm is fantastic. What’s even more fantastic is that he’s asking for feedback and iterating. For now, let’s focus on the non-data elements that are detracting from the data. If you simply take away the giant American flag and the app logos, you have a much simpler viz. Nish took that advice and created this:

So much cleaner. So much simpler. So much easier to understand. Well done Nish!

And now…

THE FAVORITES

Author: Neil Richards
Link: Tableau Public

Author: Tom Shanley‏
Link: Twitter

Author: Daniel Caroli
Link: Tableau Public