Content marketing is very popular. 88% of marketers say they use content marketing and three-quarters of all marketers plan on producing more this year. That is a lot of content being generated on behalf of brands, despite the fact that 44% of marketers are neutral on its effectiveness. Despite having a huge number of forms of content to deliver—blogs, videos, infographics, slideshows, articles, listicles, webinars—the effectiveness of the content is really dependent upon the story of the content itself. If a brand’s story isn’t worth telling, is it really worth a listicle or motion graphic? Isn’t the real opportunity for content marketing in the data behind the story that behind the content marketing tactic? Read More
Failure of the Equal Rights Amendment
When Phyllis Schlafly died recently, many obituaries remembered her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment stated that the rights guaranteed Constitution apply equally to all persons regardless of their sex. Schlafly was able to evoke fear of changes to the draft, single-sex restrooms and child custody laws to Read More
I love BEST OF lists. Here is a compilation of some of my favorite 2014 Best of Lists, updated periodically.
- 2014 the Year in Graphics by The Washington Post
- The 18 Best Infographics of 2014 by Co.Design, Fast Company
- Best Data Visualization 2014 by Nathan Yau, Flowing Data
- The Most Beautiful Data Visualizations of 2014 on Fast Company
- Best Science Visualizations of the Year on Wired
- Our favorite Pew Research Center Visualizations from 2014 from Pew Research Center
- Best Movie Posters of 2014 by Adrian Curry
- Best Book Covers of 2014 by
- 50 Covers for 2014 by the Casual Optimist
- Best Books of 2014 by NPR 2014 Book Concierge
- Best of 2014 from Longform
- Top 100 Movies of 2014 on Rotten Tomatoes
- Best Games by Platform on IGN
- NPR’s Best Songs of 2014
- 2014 Best Science Fiction & Fantasy by Kirkus
- Best of 2014 in Lists at The Guardian
- Best Art Shows of 2014 at Vulture
I was very inspired by the PBS documentary on the National Parks, America’s Best Idea. To understanding the extensive system of U.S. National Parks I used information from the National Parks Service and Google Fusion to create these maps of the U.S. National Parks acreage and visits.
Comparatively, the sheer size of Alaska and its national park lands (over 54 million acres) dwarfs that of the other 49 states. Hence using color to differentiate different quantities was difficult because Alaska is such an outlier. I ended up increasing the color scale so I had a wider range of values to better show scale. This Read More
I have been working on some different visualizations of data and needed to map data to a US map. There are a LOT of tools out there designed to make this process easier. I’ve been rolling around in a few of them and found some pros and cons for each. I wanted to visually show the amount of energy produced and consumed by each state in the U.S. This date is easily available in many forms at the US Energy Information Administration who provides their data in multiple, usable formats. Mapping energy data, even with the tools out there, turned out to be an interesting exploration. Read More