Gay rights visualization is a beauty!

The Guardian published an interactive and colorful dataviz on gay right on US states. One thing that strike me about this visualization is how properly color coding is used. Many times, you see a visualization that colors are only used to cherrify the piece. Designers at the Guardian used faded color to indicate limited support and full opaque color for maximum support for a specific gay right in a state, which allows us to look at the overall picture and answer visually the generic question of “How much this country/state is supportive on gay rights?”.

On a side note, Co.design called this an infographic, however I think this falls into the category of data visualization/information visualization. Not sure if this categorization of data visualization is common and valid but I prefer to call a piece ‘infographic’ if it is not allowing an analysis of data the it is visualising. I refer to visual.ly for examples of infographics, and I believe you can see the difference.

(via Co.design)

Published on May 10, 2012 and tagged with data • visualization