Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook. Brilliant infographic showing exactly how the visibility of different aspects of your Facebook profile has changed in increments since 2005. Also a nice example of Processing.js in action.

# 9th May 2010, 11:53 am / facebook, infographics, privacy, processing, processingjs, recovered

The Case For An Older Woman. OK Cupid’s fascinating statistics blog uses cleverly plotted aggregate data from the dating site to illustrate the difference in age tastes between the genders (men try to date younger women) and show why that might not be the best strategy. An infographics tour-de-force.

# 17th February 2010, 10:20 pm / dating, graphs, data, infographics, okcupid

The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data.

# 25th January 2010, 1:11 pm / ui, design, usability, netflix, new-york-times, infographics, visualisation, arcview, gis, hpricot, metacritic

Crayola Crayon Colors Multiply Like Rabits. “In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120”—and here’s a brilliantly designed infographic showing how it happened.

# 19th January 2010, 2:44 pm / design, infographics, crayola, colour

How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools. This is the trick I’ve been using to generate choropleths at the Guardian for the past year: figure out the preferred colours for a set of data in a Python script and then rewrite an SVG file to colour in the areas. I use ElementTree rather than BeautifulSoup but the technique is exactly the same. The best thing about SVG is that our graphics department can export them directly out of Illustrator, with named layers and paths automatically becoming SVG ID attributes. Bonus tip: sometimes you don’t have to rewrite the SVG XML at all, instead you can generate CSS to colour areas by ID selector and inject it in to the top of the file.

# 12th November 2009, 10:49 am / choropleths, mapping, python, infographics, beautifulsoup, elementtree, css, svg

Cartographer.js. “Thematic mapping for Google Maps”—which means an easy way of adding heat maps (aka chloropleths), pie charts and point clusters as a layer over a Google map.

# 1st November 2009, 1:20 pm / google-maps, google, catography, maps, mapping, heatmaps, piecharts, graphs, infographics, visualisation, chloropleths

How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Classy interactive infographic from the New York Times.

# 10th August 2009, 3:37 pm / new-york-times, visualisation, infographics, interactives