How David McCandless makes beautiful … How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go...

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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How David McCandless makes beautifulvisualizations that go viral over and over

David McCandless makes data visualizations. Beautiful, informative, whimsical, extremelypopular data visualizations.

He's published hundreds of them in a pair of books — the 2009 book Information is

Beautiful[1] and the long-awaited sequel Knowledge is Beautiful[2], published last month —but also allows them to be disseminated across the web, where they spread like wildfire.

(David McCandless)

It's very likely that you've seen some of them previously. We've published a few here at

Vox (his ranking of dog breeds[3], his diagram of the world's deadliest diseases[4], and his

chart of common misconceptions[5]), and each time we do, readers share them over and

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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over.

What's the secret behind them? An exhaustive, selective creative process that tookMcCandless and researcher Miriam Quick about two years to create the 250-page book.

"There's quite a high attrition rate. I started with about 400 or so ideas that made it todifferent stages of production, and about 100 ended up in the book," McCandless says."The concept has to be pretty strong to survive."

Here's a look at his process.

Getting an idea

"The vast majority of the time — maybe 90 percent — I start with an idea or question, nota dataset," McCandless says. "Often, it's because I feel frustrated or bewildered by newsreporting or world events. I often feel there's something lacking in the way things arecontextualized or explained, so that's inspiration for me."

That urge is pretty obvious with some visualizations, such as this chart that shows theamount of media attention given to various diseases and other threats (left), compared tothe actual number of deaths they've caused (right):

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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Slide the middle bar back and forth to compare the two graphs. (David McCandless)

On the other hand, some of McCandless' visualizations are more lighthearted — such asthis look at how many kills each action star has had over the course of his film career:

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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[6]

The size of each action star's circle represents the number of kills he or she made in total,

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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and the length of the line represents the number of kills per film. Click to enlarge[7].

(David McCandless/Knowledge is Beautiful[8])

"I actually got that idea for after seeing a small graphic[9] in the Los Angeles Times thatcounted how many kills Sylvester Stallone had made in movies with and without his shirton," McCandless says. "It got me thinking."

His ranking of dog breeds[10], meanwhile, was just something he was idly curious about."I'd never seen anything looking at that particular question," he says.

[11]

A ranking of all dog breeds[12], in terms of both public popularity and McCandless' own

data-based analysis. Click to enlarge[13]. (David McCandless/Knowledge is Beautiful[14])

Collecting and analyzing the data

The next step is searching for data that might bring clarity to a question, and explainsomething important about it to readers.

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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"Sometimes that data is readily available online already," McCandless says. "Much moreoften, I find a dataset that I need to scrape or mine and clean up substantially to getsomething usable." In total, he says, time spent processing data takes up about 80percent of his process.

Sometimes the collection process is manual. This chart showing the number of lines ofcode in various programs (and a few living organisms) required manually gathering datafrom a huge variety of sources — NASA, press releases, Quora, and the open source

network OpenHub[15]. (This is a partial version of the chart — click to see the enormous

whole thing[16].)

[17]

(David McCandless/Knowledge is Beautiful[18])

To build this interactive exploration of every commercial plane crash[19] over the last 20years, he built a script that pulled plane crash data from various websites, but then had towork heavily to clean it up and eliminate irrelevant information — such as the causes ofnon-commercial flight crashes, which he wasn't interested in.

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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In some cases, McCandless goes searching for data with a particular variable in mind. Forhis chart of Facebook breakups over the course of the year, for instance, he searched the

now-gone Facebook Lexicon[20] (a database of the frequency certain words appear onFacebook over time) for words that reflected someone announcing a breakup.

(David McCandless/Knowledge is Beautiful[21])

In other cases, he studies the data after collecting a broader sample of variables, lookingfor a particular aspect of it that helps him understand something new — and might tellan interesting story to readers. "With plane crashes, I was curious — what's the maincause of them? Is it human error? Weather? Mechanical failure?" he says.

Though he has to choose one or a couple of variables to include in his visualizations, he

also posts the full data sets[22] of many online, and encourages readers to go there tolearn more.

Designing the visualization

What you end up seeing — the design — takes up a relatively small percentage of thetime McCandless spends on any given visualization.

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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"Sometimes I start the design by hand, drawing my idea," he says. "Sometimes I use asuite of digital tools I've developed that allow me to pump data in and experiment with anumber of different layouts."

Usually, he tries our two or three different approaches, and one pops out to him as awinner. Then, he renders it, colors it, and decides on other aesthetic details.

Text mostly comes at the end, but it's crucial. McCandless actually started out as a writer,and in some cases, he sees the final text as even more important than the design. In thiscollection of logical fallacies, for instance, accurately describing and exemplifying eachfallacy was the key.

"These ideas can be mentally hard to grasp," he says, "so I really wanted to bring each onetogether and define it succinctly, and also include an example that people can relate to."

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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1. http://www.amazon.com/Information-Beautiful-David-McCandless/dp/0007294662

2. http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Beautiful-Impossible-Invisible-Connections--Visualized-ebook/dp/B00OG9U9XE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418929791&sr=1-1&keywords=knowledge+is+beautiful

3. http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/14/7220303/dog-breeds-ranked

4. http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/10/17/6993851/diseases-deadly-infectious-reproduction-information-beautiful

5. http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/6/7167675/everything-you-think-you-know-is-wrong-in-one-chart

6. https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2879980/KIB_Action-Movie-Badasses_1440__1_.0.png

7. https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2879980/KIB_Action-Movie-Badasses_1440__1_.0.png

8. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

9. http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/check-this-out-rambo-kill-chart/

10. http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/14/7220303/dog-breeds-ranked

11. http://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2458956/dog_chart_2.0.png

12. http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/14/7220303/dog-breeds-ranked

13. http://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2458956/dog_chart_2.0.png

14. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

15. https://www.openhub.net/

16. https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2880082/1276_Codebases.0.png

17. https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2880082/1276_Codebases.0.png

18. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

(David McCandless/Knowledge is Beautiful[23])

Links

10/7/2015 How David McCandless makes beautiful visualizations that go viral over and over ­ Vox

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19. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/plane-truth/

20. http://emarketingparadigm.com/facebook_lexicon

21. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/peak-break-up-times-on-facebook/

22. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/data/

23. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetological-fallacies/

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