With so many options for visualizing data, how can you be certain that you’re selecting the right visualization? Start by asking three key questions.
This was a long article with a lot of text and not a lot of art other than some tiny icons used to represent different kinds of charts, graphs, and maps. For the print edition, I worked with a graphic designer to lay this out in a logical way over two pages. It somehow simultaneously felt like a tight squeeze and too big of a space to fill, but we made it work. When it came to putting this up on the website, it turned out that I had way too many icons to fit on the web page. But it didn’t feel right to only include some icons and leave the rest out. I decided to make a story map for this article as well. But this time, I had to enlist the help of a second graphic designer to design each page so it looked clean and attractive. The result was better than I expected.