Satellite Images of Japan Before and After Earthquake and Tsunami
These images show the before and after of certain areas of Japan before and after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit. Rather than putting the images side by side, the New York Time decides to overlay the pictures on top of each other, matching up the buildings and areas exactly. By adding the slider, you can see how small parts of the areas are affected, such as houses, bridges, and buildings being completely demolished, beaches disappearing, and green fields turning brown. There’s a clear contrast between the before and afters, in color especially as we see beautiful saturated greens and blues contrasted with bleak grays and browns. The interactive graphic effectively illustrates and answers the question of just how much damage the earthquake and tsunami really dealt to Japan.
Measure of a Nation
Measure of a Nation’s insightful interactive graphic shows the ranking of 14 countries in key aspects of the nation: safety, health, education, equality, and democracy. It uses a donut graph to show the many different categories in which they are comparing each country with the outer edge as rank 1 and inner edge as rank 14. The graphic illustrates how “good” a country is compared to other countries. They make an interesting choice of aligning each wedge by the average measure in each category, so the wedges are all different heights, some averaging towards the outer edge while others towards the inner edge. We can see how each country scores in each through the side menu that lists the countries and reflects the standings of the specified country in each category. The graphic uses color to showcase the standings with green being the top 3, yellow the middle 8, and red being bottom 3. We can get a sense of how well the country scores in each category with the colors alone and get a general understanding of the country through its balance of colors. Within each wedge, it’s interesting to see the differences between each country, especially when there are massive disparities between them.
Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”
The animations and graphs show the speed of which a hypothetical virus could spread through a small community. The question that it is trying to answer is the title of the article but more specifically illustrating just HOW FAST it can spread in different scenarios. The progression of the entire article also lends itself to great information design because it lays down the basics for the rest of the animations, showing the chain of events of one sick person infecting others and their recovery. In each next graphic, we can see how the movement of the sick affects the rest of the population with not only the simulation itself but also the animated graph paired with it. Through the graphs we can see how the number of sick people increases over time, but it’s the shape of it that matters as it seeks to show how we can “flatten the curve”. The shape of the sick person graph changes from simulation to simulation, and we can see how the curve goes from a hump to a nearly straight line as more and more people stay still and “social distance”.