Bubble, bubble toil and trouble

Recently we wanted to show how Concentrate, our new long-tail search analytics tool, could give you a view of search patterns across travel websites. As political junkies, we were inspired by this chart from our friends at the NY Times.

The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a NY Times quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem. Here’s a draft of how far I got before giving in to label fatigue.

The bubbles themselves aren’t tough, but getting the labels right is hard. I’d love to see a solution, so if any reader wants to tackle it eternal fame can be yours. Here is a CSV if you want to try.

travelpatterns.csv

Another of the tools we use at Juice is NodeBox, which we used to make this:

Here’s the code that made the graph.

The power of a programmatic approach like this is that by changing a line or two, you can get the following. Click for a larger version. Click the text for the code..

READ

Why Business Intelligence and Design Theory Must Merge

Vary formatting by value

Drop the labels, tighten the spacing

Display the largest item in each row as a red square

With g…

Recently we wanted to show how Concentrate, our new long-tail search analytics tool, could give you a view of search patterns across travel websites.
As political junkies, we were inspired by this chart from our friends at the NY Times.

The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a NY Times quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem. Here’s a draft of how far I got before giving in to label fatigue.

The bubbles themselves aren’t tough, but getting the labels right is hard. I’d love to see a solution, so if any reader wants to tackle it eternal fame can be yours. Here is a CSV if you want to try.

travelpatterns.csv

Another of the tools we use at Juice is NodeBox, which we used to make this:

Here’s the code that made the graph.

The power of a programmatic approach like this is that by changing a line or two, you can get the following. Click for a larger version. Click the text for the code..

Vary formatting by value

Drop the labels, tighten the spacing

Display the largest item in each row as a red square

With great power comes a great need to exercise restraint. Otherwise you end up like these poor chaps. Must… flex… restraint… muscles…

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