Jason and I have always been fans of the great presentation of data and it is an important skill in communicating economics. Good examples that we have discussed on this blog include the Democrats health plan diagram, the averages from the American Time Use Dataset, and the breakdown of the Federal Reserve balance sheet. Jason sent me this link to one of the coolest blogs I have ever seen: InformationIsBeautiful.net. This is an entire blog dedicated to the artful and effective visual presentation of data. Below is a graphic from a post about disease case fatality rates if you wash your hands.
Another good graphic that Jason pointed out to me a number of years ago still remains at the top of my list as the coolest graphic I've ever seen. In February 2008, The New York Times published an interactive graphic (screen shot below) that showed total box office revenues from 1986 to 2008 broken down by movie. You can scroll back and forth using the scroll bar along the bottom, and each individual movie gets highlighted and labeled as you pass your mouse arrow over it.
Here's to the great presentation of data. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Those are fantastic! They beat standard Excel output anyday. I wonder what people use to produce these?