Fast Data

It's quite amazing to see the explosion of data + design. Everywhere you look, data is now being communicated in a visual way. The most common occurrence of this intersection of data + design occurs with infographics. One infographic that is able to communicate a wealth of information in a visual way is the 2014 US Federal Budget from Visual.ly : Death and Taxes 2014: US Federal Budget infographic by jess .

Haven't updated this blog in awhile, but I figured I might as well share the  slide deck  that I came up with for my Mom. Hope y'all will take the time to honor and to thank your Mothers this weekend! :) And while you're at it, be sure to check out  Haiku Deck  - a great app to create slide decks! And to set your story free!

Even though Photoshop doesn't seem related to data, you'd be surprised by the reach and breadth of Photoshop.  Especially with the growing fascination of infographics, Photoshop and Illustrator are useful tools for any data analyst. I'll admit that they are programs I am still trying to learn better.  When I stumbled across this Photoshop CS6 Cheat Sheet from Zerolag.com , I made sure to save a copy. Hope it'll be useful for you too! Photoshop CS6 Cheat Sheet By ZeroLag Hosting – Experts in Magento Hosting

With the release of Tableau 8 , there are a host of new features including brand-new visualizations. I took one of my old visualizations and revamped it with things you can only do in version 8. Here's a summary of the things I changed from my original U.S. Unemployment Rate Viz: Decided to pull the latest unemployment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (data is up to Feb 2013).  Utilized a treemap to show the Unemployment Rate % by state (from 2000-2012). Treemaps are an effective way to show many slices of information! Tried using the new packed bubbles visualization to display the U.S. annual unemployment rate (avg) from 2000-2012. It's a catchy way to show information although it can be a bit tricky to use since it may or may not be more effective than your standard bar chart. I'll let you decide. :) Floating containers everywhere! Added text to guide the user on how to use the map as a filter, put color legends closer to the visualizations, and pu...

With the economy still in a tough spot, I was curious to see how much money is spent across every major sport in the United States. Being a huge baseball, football, and basketball fan, I really wanted to see who spends the most money on payroll and who is the highest paid player in all sports. Feel free to play around with this visualization. The insights I found were really interesting and it's amazing how much money there is in sports across the United States. We definitely love our sports and we're willing to pay big bucks for entertainment. Hover over the "Information" icon to get more details on how to interact with this visualization. My insights and analysis are below this visualization. <a href="undefined"><img alt=" " src="http://public.tableausoftware.com/static/images/Sp&am...

Lately, it seems there has been an explosion with infographics. The ability to visually and effectively convey data is growing in importance. It's not enough to just show data, but to do so in a way that demands attention. And hopefully, spurs action. Best way to present and to show data - use an interactive infographic . This infographic does a great job of explaining what it is and how to make it go viral: Created by Customer Magnetism, an award winning Internet marketing agency.

I decided to enter The Tableau Interactive Biz Viz Contest and since I needed to use a financial data set, I chose to compare Apple vs Microsoft Stock Performance. Having been a big Microsoft fan back in the 90's, I thought it'd be interesting to compare Microsoft against the hottest company at the moment, Apple. Both companies have had interesting peaks and valleys. While Microsoft has been on the decline, Apple has been on a tear. It was interesting to look at the historical min, max, average stock price, and average volume of the two stocks. I then calculated the % daily difference to see the changes in close price compared to the prior day. Then I took it a step further by looking at the % difference by year using the adjusted closing (which takes into account any dividends/stock splits). It was neat to see the % difference by month too. Another way to look at the data was to construct a candlestick chart to see the high, low, open, and close each day. And to see the...