Guide to Graphics Reporting

Today, some of the most compelling stories are visual in nature, as graphic designers, data journalists, illustrators, and the like have dramatically evolved the contemporary visual vocabulary of storytelling. In fact, engaging text and visuals in the service of clear, concise explanation can have a powerful effect on a person’s ability to understand and remember information. However, in many ways, visual storytelling isn’t so different from other types of reporting.

 

Interactive Map: Sierra Nevadas

Interactive maps can use data to create physical manifestations of something that might seem abstract at first. The New York Times took data gathered by NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory to create interactive maps that show the current state of the drought in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They used NASA’s data to compare the snow that accumulated […]

 

Data Visualization: Plotting Emotion

Data visualizations can help us identify and understand relationships with data, even when the data collected is an emotion. On Inauguration Day, Vox created a poll asking readers how they felt about the incoming president. After submitting five emotions, a two-by-two matrix plotted the collective of emotions by their level of happiness and intensity. The […]

 

Information Graphic: What Time Will the Polls Close?

Tuesday November 8th is election day, and polls begin closing across the county at 6 p.m. Eastern time in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. However, voting across the county concludes at 1 a.m. Eastern time on the western islands of Alaska. The New York Times, created a simple yet effective graphic that maps when polls […]

 

Data Visualization: The Complete History Of The NFL

Sports fans are always debating which team is the greatest of all time. At FiveThirtyEight, an interactive data visualization examines the history of the National Football League using an Elo rating, which is a simple measure of strength based on game-by-game results. This allows viewers to quickly examine over 30,000 ratings and evaluate how each team […]

 

Aortic Stenosis

    Aortic valve stenosis occurs when the valve located between the heart’s left ventricle and aorta does not fully open. This causes blood to build pressure in the hear and may lead to several health problems. The diagram above does an excellent job utilizing color, explainers, and structure to explain the problem and list potential […]

 

Data Visualization: Hamilton

The critically acclaimed musical “Hamilton” contains incredibly complex rhyming lyrics that draw inspiration from traditional musical theatre as well as modern hip-hop and rap. The Wall Street Journal created an algorithm to visualize the lyrics and analyze how common rhyming and rapping techniques intertwine to create one of the most popular musicals of 2016. The […]

 

Lynda: After Effects Essential Training

Adobe After Effects is a powerful, easy-to-learn motion graphics program. It is the industry-standard tool for video compositing, motion graphics, and animation. This Lynda tutorial covers all the fundamentals of the program to help you create engaging motion graphics. The first two chapters explore the key concepts, terminology, and interface of After Effects, and break […]

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

This tutorial will provide an introduction to Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector program used to create information graphics. It’s important to note that there is a huge difference between Illustrator and Photoshop, two Adobe programs that do very different things. Photoshop is a photo manipulation program. And although you can do some very rich illustration work […]

Making Charts in Adobe Illustrator

This exercise will provide an introduction to making charts in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator allows you to enter data into a spread sheet and quickly generate pie charts, fever charts, bar charts, scatter plots and more. Illustrator is a vector based program which allows you to draw vector items. In a general sense, the term vector refers […]

 

Lynda: JavaScript Essential Training

This tutorial will teach you the basics of the core JavaScript language and syntax, hot to write it, where to put it and what tools you can use. JavaScript is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. Click here to go to the tutorial.