Here are a collection of maps that succeed in providing some serious amount of information while remaining understandable.
Although they look daunting in their scope of information, it’s much easier than trying to understand the raw data. They may be a little out of date, but the design and method of presenting information is great.
Choose Your Weapon, The Global Arms Trade
SSSMokin!, The Global Tobacco Trade
Red Tape, The Government Grind
These maps can be found at the Princeton International Networks Archive: Infographics.
The purpose of the Archive is to assemble data sets relevant to empirical research on mapping the global web in a central location and to standardize them so the various indicators can be combined.
The maps deal with an array of major current world issues, from the serious to the seriously frivolous. They were developed for the INA by Jonathan Harris of Flaming Toast Productions.
Getting Around, Transportation Today
Glass Half Empty, The Coming Water Wars
Stealing The Show, The Global Movie Biz
I love finding maps which not only provide rich information, but also take design aesthetics into consideration as well.
This map show the global presence of Starbucks coffee shops and McDonald’s restaurants. When examined graphically, both companies act as global hubs that connect some of the world’s poorest, most remote countries with some of the wealthiest.
The Magic Bean Shop & The Fries that Bind Us, Starbucks and McDonalds’ Global Presence
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Category and Tags
This post filed in the following categories:
- Business - Discusses general business concepts, techniques, and information of interest.
- Infographic - Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge.
- Visualization - Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.
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now that its done i wonder if its good enough to join the list !"
He did one small mistake, unfortunately everyone does mistakes."
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Starbucks and McDonalds: the scale on the bottom right uses the height of a logo to denote an amount. But aren’t people more likely to look at the area of the logo? I find these kinds of charts misleading.
Hi Christian,
You’re right, it isn’t intuitive in an accurate sense. My mind latches on to the overall size of the logo as a measurement rather than merely the height.
Thanks
Hi,
I agree with Christian above, the misleading design on the Starbucks/McD maps is a common yet frustrating error. Tufte named it the “lie factor” already in the early nineties:
http://www.google.com/search?q=lie+factor
Another example is the Red Tape map, where the size of the letters is simply disconnected from what they represent – but the color isn’t.
Fancy Form over Function, imho.
Otherwise, thanks for an interesting blog.