No rule without an exception. I did find that one through Bill. A climber can use cracks to secure himself. You need a cam of the right size for that. Modern ones are based on eccentric panels and are [...]

Rolf had a great idea: A map is easy to understand, because rivers are blue and forest is green. It took a while before everyone acknowledged that. Maps are understood, if they adhere to the common [...]

Labradores like me like to swim. Can be analytically refreshing, too. On that small islet I met two french school girls. They discussed Saturn and the Earth. How large and how small. One of them hinted [...]

Many concepts feel like “a solution desperately seeking an application“. Sometimes waiting is futile. Square pies are such an issue. Wired offers a colorful mystery-pie. It argues that household [...]

He has won the Oscar in informatics: the 2007 Innovation Prize of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) for his work on "Hybrid Data Mining".

German Informatics Society (GI) awarded Dr. Nicolas Bissantz the 2007 Innovation Award for his work with management information at the organization's annual convention in Bremen, Germany. The jury [...]

My friend Chiara has sent me a graph about car colors and color as an attribute. From the German newspaper “Nürnberger Nachrichten”. It’s about the temperature dogs have to endure when in summer [...]

Great. German marriages are increasingly stable. Even better: the graph in the German newspaper „Welt am Sonntag (WamS)“. It's creator also lives in the deaf dog area. That's where you are immune [...]

Dogs hear quite well. Sometimes they read minds. Some designers think: "What boring numbers. It's nothing to write home about." Others believe: "If there is nothing to illustrate, what am I a designer [...]

Visualization often focuses on changes in shares which are compared to a total. Stacked column graphs which add up to 100% are a common chart type. But not for more than three shares at once. Readability [...]

Management is difficult. A boss has to have everything under control at the same time. He prefers to have this Everything in best order. But what is best order? My friend Petra says: if a traffic [...]

The recent European Union's summit was exhausting. Not just for politicians but also for information designers. Comparing two measurements is (in some cases) already tempting. Three is even harder. In [...]

Being dogmatic is still my nature. And I continue to hate traffic-light colors. However, I do like the traffic-light elements of Summize. They display product ratings with multi-color bars. In the example [...]

Being dog-matic is my nature. To use color appropriately is difficult. My suggestion is to avoid color. There are exceptions. In some cases color is an attribute of the object in question and not a means [...]

Worse than radar charts? Mosaic displays! Data on hair and eye color of 592 students is transformed into this: The relative frequency is displayed as an area. However, the eye isn’t good in comparing [...]

For the time being, the best data graphics come from the American elite papers. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post provide clean graphs, free of chart junk and information [...]

Average and median intend to characterize distributions with a single value. Often, this is not enough. If you want to understand data you have to look at it. Rafe has a nice idea how to do this in an [...]

Every pixel is valuable in Pixelland. The graph below is still pixel-junk on Pixelland's standards. The parantheses waste 30 valuable pixels. The vertical line costs 11 pixels. Empty [...]

There were nice charts in the German journal "Bild der Wissenschaft" 3/2006. They showed risk maps for Germany. Sadly, they weren’t readable. A little trick and they would have been brilliant. A color [...]

People who handle real-time data love tickers. People who love to use their screen real estate efficiently love them, too. Movement substitutes display width. People who hate too much program interaction [...]

Yesterday was perfect. He stumbled over Maeda’s lifecounter. Ten minutes later we left the office – and spent the rest of the day in the woods. (Thanks, John!) Today is different. I heard him gnarl [...]

OK... I'll blush a little now: Some fans wanted to see me again with my ski outfit and others asked whether dogs celebrate New Year's Eve, too. Dogs do celebrate New Year's Eve and they don't handle [...]

What is better: tables or charts? That was discussed in the past. Some said a chart is worth a thousand words. I think a picture is worth a thousand words. And most charts need a thousand words to be [...]

I know I can see sparklines. And even hear them. But eat them? As seen in Vienna.

A time-series is a pattern. It climbs upward and descends, patterns are stable or swinging, they change slowly or abruptly. The pattern is more important than the actual values. To understand the pattern [...]

The question was: Do you use your handy for music and photos? 15 % said yes and I do not longer use other devices for both, the rest, 85 % said yes, but I also use other devices. The question was: are [...]

Edward says: Use sparklines. Sparklines are data words. Or word graphics. A number without a history is boring. And can mislead. Even so, newspapers show lots of individual numbers. Deutsche Telekom's [...]