Data Visualization

Each year, Pioneers in Engineering seeks out new corporate sponsors for our robotics program. To aid that search and better inform potential sponsors, I created some visualizations of our data from student demographics and financials. Disclaimer — the data here are estimates for the 2016–2017 year.

You may recognize the styling of the graphs. I enjoy FiveThirtyEight’s clarity and simplicity in their graphs and sought to emulate it. I got this adaptation from Austin Clemens with minor adjustments.

One choice I made for these graphs was to use bar charts over pie charts for the graphs with percentages. I wanted to emphasize comparisons between categories and easily identify amounts without labels. Bar charts are able to do this better by using lengths rather than angles for values and using a consistent baseline. The Mission has an interesting article that further compares pie and bar graphs and their use cases.