Saturday, December 3, 2011

Interactive Google Table








With the news of Herman Cain's campaign suspension, a graphic explaining the subtle differences between what a candidate calls there campaign can help readers better understand the story. Here's a simple table made in Google Charts that can be sorted by user preference when they click on the column headers. This table's colors can also be customized like the other charts, but it requires using CSS instead of customizing the Javascript specific to that chart.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

CHART OF THE DAY: CBO Says Dem Plans Create More Jobs








Use the buttons to the right to see which policies the parties support.


Years of FTE employment per million dollars of total budgetary cost.




When I made this chart I knew the important thing was to compare and contrast the Republican and Democratic proposals. This Google Chart uses three buttons to show this plainly and effectively. Not only does it illustrate how much less the GOP proposals would affect the employment, but how comparatively few they actually support.




If you prefer a non interactive chart, this picture illustrates the same idea by coloring the policy proposals based on their support by the parties. I admit this is very close to the original, but I wanted to highlight that I can quickly recreate simple charts (this took about an hour) in a higher resolutions with improved clarity, TPM style fonts or colors, and story specific information.

CHART: The More Congress ‘Fails’ The More The Deficit Goes Down


This chart started with an idea: 'what if I could show how the various policies affect the deficit?'. I tried to do it in Google Charts but I quickly realized that was simply too limited. Instead, I went through the process of calculating how the four major policy changes outlined in the article each affected the deficit. Then I created a chart in Illustrator for each one and created the interactive chart you see above using Hype. The individual policies could have all been shown on the same chart, but it would have looked extremely busy and been hard to read and still wouldn't have contained as much information as the chart I created.

Note: Because Hype uses HTML 5, it works best in Safari and Chrome.





In this simple Google Chart, I decided to make the graphic into an area chart instead of a line chart to better illustrate the literal size of the deficit if current policies are continued. This is because the 7.1 number actually comes from adding up the difference between the two points in each year. Because this chart only goes up to 1.2 (trillion), readers might miss that detail in a regular line chart and not immediately understand where the 7.1 comes from.