Greetings! We hope you had a great Valentine’s Day and wonderful February so far! To celebrate, we’d like to share our love of our favorite part of our jobs; data.
At S2 Research, we believe that data is beautiful! With every report we work on, we constantly refine and improve our data visualizations because it’s what helps tell the story.
And there is an abundance of data out there in the world, but presenting that data is an art within itself, which can be crafted beautifully if done well. We decided to collect data that we think is beautiful and reveals meaningful and unique designs. Here are our picks for our top 10 favorite pieces of data visualization!
How Probable is……. By Gradient Metrics
For our first data visualization, we’d like to share this graph from a survey that presented a list of words to describe probability and asked respondents to indicate what percentage of probability is associated with those words. This one is important to us as market researchers, as we frequently ask questions revolving around likelihood. Verbiage is crucial to make sure we capture the most authentic responses of our respondents within our market research surveys. For the most part, we agree with how probable each of the words mean. Although, it’s interesting to see how ‘never’ is more probable than pigs flying.
Gender Gap in the Olympic Games by Leniolabs
The Olympic Winter Games are currently taking place, so this chart is a perfect one to share! Over the years, the Winter Games have added several new sports to its catalog. However, during the early days, the majority of these games were male-only. In fact, out of the 11 sports in the 1924 Winter Olympics, only one sport was for women (that was figure skating). As the years passed, women started gaining more of their own sports, and this graph, created by Leniolabs, depicts the gender gap throughout every Winter Olympic event. As of 2022, men and women now have nearly the same amount of categories (with women being short of only one sport).
We love this data viz because it easily shows how the gender gap in the Winter Olympic games has significantly narrowed. With their live graph, you can also see which sports were held by year. If you’re into the Olympics, definitely give this one a look.
Global Annual Gaming Console Sales from 2002 to January 2021 by PieChartPirate
At S2 Research, we love gaming, so we had to share this one with you! This chart presents the total sales of gaming consoles throughout the years, showing the market share of the most successful ones. There’s a ton of insights to extract from this one, like how the PS2 took an overwhelming majority of the market share for several years, or how Nintendo consoles either thrive with massive sales, or come very short among other consoles. We hope we didn’t add fuel to the console wars, all of them are great!
In terms of data visualization, you can never go wrong with pie charts to depict the size of the share. This one is easy to gauge and observe the evolution of the sales of video game consoles.
Breakdown of Hires and Separation by Bit.io
Next, we have an interesting set of data. A common topic of discussion is “The Great Resignation” and how many people across the US have quit their jobs and not returned to them, and this graph aims to answer the question as to whether or not it’s true. The first thing that pops out is the layoffs and discharges section. Because of the pandemic, several people were laid off from their jobs, causing a staggering dip within this chart. A short time after this, the number of hired workers significantly peaked. What is interesting, however, is that this peak is not as large as the dip from the layoffs and discharges, which could mean there is a large portion of people still unemployed. The good news is that aside from the peak, the number of hired workers is the largest it’s ever been, and layoffs are decreasing as well.
This data viz caught our eye for a number of reasons; the area line charts along with the color combination allows us to easily determine how many workers were affected in each category, allowing for easy comparisons. What other insights did you pull from this chart?
Number of Social Media Users Since Launch by StaDaFa
What’s your favorite social media? We have an interesting graph depicting the number of social media users for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. While each platform has millions of users, each has their own growth rates. Twitter, while being one of the older social media platforms on this list, actually has stagnated with the slowest user growth out of the bunch, and hasn’t even peaked over 500 million users. In contrast, TikTok has the fastest growth rates for users out of all social media platforms, having significantly more users at Year 4 (and reaching 1 billion users!) Facebook, despite being the oldest social media platform on this list, remains to be the most popular social media platform with almost 3 billion users! Let’s see how this graph looks in 10 years.
Walt Disney World Ticket Price Increase vs Wages, Rent, and Gasoline by PieChartPirate
Inflation has been increasing for many products and services in the US throughout the years, but none of their price increases compare to that of Walt Disney World’s ticket prices. What started off as an affordable ticket, has now skyrocketed in price. This graph shows the price increases of various services, which include rent, wages, gasoline, and of course, Disney World tickets.
Since 1977, the price of Disney World’s admission tickets have increased by a staggering 3,871.4 percent! This is huge, considering that wages and the price of rent and gasoline have only grown just under 1000 percent. This is a cool graph because not only does it show the significant differences between their price increase, it also includes various financial crises which have impacted the economy.
Why do you guys think Disney World tickets have increased so much? Let us know in the comments!
Color Composition of Red-White-Blue Flags
Now we’d like to share a unique graph that comes in the shape of a triangle, and this one breaks down the percentages of the color composition among countries with red, white, and/or blue flags. What stands out immediately is that the majority of flags have more red than any other color, and many countries have over half of their color composition to be red. What’s interesting is that France is not completely in the middle. This is because France’s flag color proportions are not equal : there is 30% blue, 33% white, and 37% red! Pretty cool, huh?
The Population of Manhattan, Hour by Hour
This next one is a live 3-D chart of Manhattan displaying the population of various locations throughout the city. It also has a timeline of its population throughout hours of the day. It seems that establishments, especially in the heart of the city, typically peak around 12-2pm. What is surprising, however, is the fact that the population on the weekend didn’t peak higher than the weekdays as anticipated. You would think with tourism that the city would be more populated during these days.
Next time you’re out there, make sure to stay away from the red areas from 12-2pm if you’re in a rush!
Record Music Industry Revenues
This one's for you music heads out there! Throughout the years, music has come in several formats, ranging from vinyl (which is slowly making a comeback) to streaming, which is now emerging among all formats. Despite its increase, it still has a ways to go if it wants to reach peak levels like cassette tapes and CD’s in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
As music fans ourselves, we love how the area chart easily shows us the dominance among the different music formats. It brings back good memories of all the ways we used to listen to music.
The Most Commonly Rated Shows on IMDB and Their Lowest Rated Episodes by Bo McCready
For our last data viz, we’d like to show off this chart, which compiles popular shows and collects the rating for all of their episodes, highlighting the worst ones in red. There are many shows this graph includes, ranging from Game of Thrones and Breaking bad, to comedies like the Office and Friends, and even includes famous cartoons like the Simpsons and Family Guy!
This is by far our favorite chart of the list. It’s intriguing to see how some shows have consistently good ratings until the very last season or episode (what went wrong with Game of Thrones and Dexter?) Because of the red highlight, it’s much easier to pinpoint which episodes were the worst. The full version has many more shows, so definitely check this one out!
Wow, data is beautiful, isn’t it? Thank you for reading, we hope you enjoyed these cool data visualizations and learned something new!
Have your own data visualizations you’d like to share? Email us and we’ll put you on a future blog!
