When working at the graphics desk at Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, I was tasked to analyse all kinds of trends around one theme: How did the U.S. change after the first year of president Donald J. Trump.
On top of covering the ‘usual subjects’ like approval ratings, unemployment rates, GDP…
On Twitter, I stumbled upon this horrendous 3D bar chart. When looking at the data, it might have been made in 2005. Data visualisation as a skill was yet to be defined. Boy, we have come a long way, but this was even at the time truly bananas.
Normally I…
After a survey, the Pew Research Center came to a conclusion: U.S. Image Suffers as Publics Around World Question Trump’s Leadership. In 37 countries the question was asked if they had confidence in the US president regarding world affairs. A staggering low median of 22% was the outcome. …
The Dutch Talkshow Jinek fell into the trap of showing a 3D bar graph from the exit poll of the UK elections May 2017. Numerous times TV shows are proving that their graphic designers don’t have a clue what they’re doing when it comes to communicating data.
Every information designer/data…
To me, it almost looks like there’s no human involved making the much-needed design decisions, so I decided to contact the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).
I asked them about their process, and they answered that they use Highcharts for their graphs with a specific style guide. …
As a cure for unpalatable side effects when seeing a crappy graph I reshape them in something better. Sometimes there are those who shamelessly deceive, with or without intention. Swindling with axes, mixing correlation with causation, skewed means etc.. …
The Dutch love avocado. Newspaper Trouw published an article where they showed from which countries the Netherlands imported the green super food. In 2016, the Netherlands imported a staggering amount of 433 million kilos. That’s a record. Four out of five imported avocado are for the rest of Europe.
Their…
But he won’t because he loves it too much. When Trump invited some reporters to talk about his 100 days in office, he handed out an election map with the results of 2016. According to Reuters accompanied with the words:
Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of…
A graphics iteration process.
In the Netherlands tensions between different groups of the population is a rising hot topic. To name a few that support this trend:
- The Dutch elections: where popular populist and politician Geert Wilders used a repeatedly polarising rhetoric.
- The refugee challenge Europe copes with. This results…
