Pretty pictures don’t always tell the whole truth
Graham Odds, July 12th, 2012
Tweet I published a graphic last week that tried to put habitat figures from the UK National Ecosystem Assessment into some kind of understandable context. It has got a fair bit of attention since then, largely because Mark Easton kindly tweeted about it, resulting in the BBC website linking to it in various high-profile places. [...]
If broad habitats in the UK were clustered…
Graham Odds, July 6th, 2012
Tweet Intrigued by Mark Easton’s question on Twitter, “How much of Britain is built on?”, and inspired the associated article, The great urban myth of Britain, I wanted to put the UK NEA‘s statement that “6.8% of the UK’s land area is now classified as urban” into some kind of context that actually made sense [...]
How to undermine a good design: a case study
Graham Odds, June 14th, 2012
Tweet This article looks at a recent change to the BBC Weather website as an example of how over-use of information visualisation techniques and inconsistent design decisions can undermine what is otherwise an excellent content-first experience. I have watched with fascination over the last year as the BBC have undergone an extensive redesign of their [...]
UX London 2012
Graham Odds, April 26th, 2012
Tweet Last week I attended the UX London 2012 conference. This was my first public foray into the world of User Experience and it proved to be both educational and thought-provoking. Having read his book, Sketching User Experiences, I had high expectations of the opening presentation from Bill Buxton (@wasbuxton) and he didn’t disappoint. He [...]
Visualising StackOverflow Tag Relationships with Silverlight
Colin Eberhardt, February 20th, 2012
UPDATE: I have posted the sourcecode for this control on codeproject. Recently I have been wondering about the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 2.5 million programming question on Stack Overflow. A few weeks back I found a tag trending tool, which can be used to measure the rise and fall in [...]
Infographics – info = graphics
Graham Odds, February 9th, 2012
Tweet This article presents a concern I have regarding the development of infographics and shows an example of the kind of critical thinking I believe the world of infographics is unfortunately all too often missing. In recent years, numerical infographics have become prevalent in print and on the web. There are even popular sites dedicated [...]
A Critique of Radar Charts
Graham Odds, September 23rd, 2011
Tweet This article presents a critique of radar charts, a chart type commonly used to display multivariate data, highlighting how they are poorly designed to effectively communicate information in the underlying data, and presents a number of more effective alternatives Introduction Radar charts, sometimes known as spider, start or web charts, are a two-dimensional chart [...]
Flash On The Beach 2011
Graham Odds, September 15th, 2011
Tweet Yesterday I spoke at the Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton as part of the Elevator Pitch session. I think the session went really well, with a great mixture of topics so (hopefully) everyone was suitably entertained. As previously mentioned, my 3-minute talk was titled How I Learned to Stop Drawing Lines and [...]
Flash On The Beach 2011
Graham Odds, July 12th, 2011
Tweet Yesterday I received the exciting news that I will be speaking at the fantastic Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton this September. As Europe’s biggest annual Flash conference it brings together leading minds from all over the industry and focuses on design and development in equal share. I will be presenting as part [...]
Updating Flex Sparkline to Flex 4
Graham Odds, April 19th, 2011
In a previous post I presented a library of