The NSF has opened up voting for the People’s Choice for visualizations in the Photo, Illustration, Poster/Graphic, Interactive, and Video categories.

Voting closes Sunday December 4 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

D3 in Depth:

D3 in Depth aims to bridge the gap between introductory tutorials/books and the official documentation.

I have found D3 extremely useful for creating dynamic plots on dashboard style websites for monitoring data pipelines. This looks an excellent resource for learning it.

via FlowingData

Colorgorical is an alternative to ColorBrewer with a few different options for creating color tables. For example, you can add a couple specific colors that should be in the color table and let Colorgorical figure out the others which maximizes the perceptual difference between the colors. Colorgorical seems particularly well suited to generating qualitative color tables, e.g., to find sufficiently different colors for each line in a plot.

via FlowingData

Motivated by the below chart of the age distribution of Olympic athletes, Junk Charts presents several techniques to visualize multiple distributions:

Candidates include the traditional boxplots used by statisticians as well variations and a stack of histograms. I think violin plots, suggested by a commenter, are a nice compromise showing the full distribution.

John Nelson produced this beautiful map of how the boundaries of US droughts have changed over the last five years with data from the US Drought Monitor:

Link via FlowingData

Part 2 (of what promises to be a four part series) of the great comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps by Justin O’Beirne. See part 1 before starting with part 2.

This is an example of using a clever color key that doubles as a histogram showing the distribution of the corresponding areas.

By the way, this post is from a great series about small ways to make better visualizations.

Nice example of why rainbow color tables can be misleading:

Regular readers will be aware of the #endrainbow campaign to reduce the use of rainbow colour palettes in scientific figures. At the recent EGU conference, I gave a talk on ‘making better figures’, which included an example of a published conclusion which was incorrect due to the use of a rainbow colour scheme.

via @asoconnor via @rsimmon

This is a great article about the change in balance between cities and roads in Google Maps between 2010 and 2016.

He also compares Google Maps versions to an old printed map:

Even though it’s from the early 1960s, the old map is more balanced than the Google map.

There are a lot of visualization lessons to be learned from cartography.

This is a great idea to visualize the punctuation in novels:

Inspired by a series of posters, I wondered what did my favorite books look like without words. Can you tell them apart or are they all a-mush? In fact, they can be quite distinct.