That was my Processing exercise for tonight: red circle = energy consumption yellow circle = energy production y-position = consumption / production Inspired by David McCandless

• Source: epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu

Comments

Patrick Martin (Aug 04, 2012)

First of all, great post as usual.

I think that this visualization would be more effective with quadrants and the x axis as production, y axis for consumption, keeping the shading and inner rings as you have defined them.

I have read that location is the primary visual that the human mind picks up on, followed by size and color and so on.

I’ve been kicking around different ideas to show more information than is currently available in gapminder type visuals through use of opacity, inner rings as you have done, etc…

For instance, size might be nice to show consumption with inner rings for the various sources of power (nuclear, hydro, coal, natural gas) and so on.

I had an early attempt at visualizing natural gas consumption over here using D3 and gapminder like design:

http://www.javainc.com/projects/dex/examples/vis/d3/timelapse/NaturalGasVersusCoal.html

Changing this to show power evolution across energy sources was on my to-do list. However, it can quickly become overwhelming and I believe a circle is not the most effective way for the human mind to perceive fractional areas. I was wondering if something like miniature treemaps might be appropriate.

• Pat