October 31, 2011

xkcd visualizations

I'm a big fan of Randall Munroe’s web comic xkcd.  I find its nerdy humour particularly amusing.  Randall often employs visualization in xkcd, so I've combed through the xkcd archives and picked out some of my favourite examples.

Movie Narrative Charts


Days of the Week

Radiation Dose Chart
I've blogged about this one previously.  Following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, Monroe published the following chart to provide some perspective on radiation doses.


Money
And in a similar vein is this epic graphic...


Tic-Tac-Toe

Colour
Randall conducted a survey of 222,550 users (sessions) for the names they ascribed to over five million colours.  From a subset of the results he built the map below showing the most popular names for the fully-saturated colours.


Self-Description
Three clever self-referential charts.


Some rare examples of good infographics:

Height


Gravity Wells


Lakes and Oceans


Fuck Grapefruit
The outlier that is grapefruit.


Exoplanets

Congress

Angular Size

Our Neighbourhood

Tall Infographics

The remaining examples I've simply grouped by type.

Maps


Line Charts


Bar Charts


Pie Charts


Flow Charts


Venn Diagrams


Miscellaneous


Please leave a comment if I've missed any.