Love was in the air for week 7 and 111 vizzes later, I sit here trying to decide which ones are my favorites. This process is much, much harder than you probably realize. I’ve come up with my own little process for remembering my favorites. As I see the vizzes throughout the week, I pin the ones that I consider “finalists” for the weekly summary to a secret Pinterest board. Then I go through those on Friday. This week I pinned about 20 vizzes and it took me an hour or so to get it down to this list of great submissions.
The data set, from the National Retail Foundation, was about Valentine’s Day spending in America over the last few years. Eva told me to expect a pink overload this week and she sure was right. Without further ado, here are a few of my favorites:
Author: David Krupp
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Love the dot plot with the range in the background
- Dots are sorted highest to lowest
- Great overall design
- Minimal use of color; every color you see has a purpose
- Nice clean font (though it doesn’t render on Tableau Public)
- Good interactivity with the filters if someone wants to explore the data
- Amazing legend!!
Author: Naomi Estrin
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Good storytelling
- Nice flow to the layout
- Effective, minimal use of color
- Dividers that split up the sections
- Good title
- Highlighting just the biggest bar
- Using hearts to note the min and max on the line charts (Though I don’t understand if the lines present % change or the spend itself. If it’s the spend, then they should all be scaled the same.)
Author: Rhodri Rowlands
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Using questions for titles
- Clean overall design
- Highlighting just the largest bar
- Good use of annotations
- Including the line chart provides good context for other years
- Good color choices
- Simple tooltips
- Interactivity isn’t required to understand it
- Including credits for the icons used
Author: Athan Mavrantonis
Link: Tableau Public
What I like:
- Using a question for the title
- Every use of red means something
- Nice sparklines
- Good summary text on the right, out of the way, to provide context
- Bar charts with big numbers under them for the latest value
- Sorting of the categories of the bar charts from largest to smallest spend
- Made an overall busy design easy to read