Tag Archive of “infographic”
Every day, the news media confronts us with enormous budgets: $3,000,000,000,000 for the Iraq war, $2,800,000,000,000 for the financial recovery, $16,000,000,000 for Facebook. Except they’re usually reported with the ambiguous numerical categories of trillion and billion. When your daily budget is a dollar, $10 billion and $10 trillion both look astronomically large — but difficult to compare. While I think listing out zeroes is helpful, despite the added space required (Hey, everything is online now anyways!), visualizations can make that comparison even easier. David McCandless has put together a good visualization of various world budgets. Though I would disagree about some of the categorizations, since government stimulus money is not actually lost, the boxes themselves are relatively useful.
In response to a horrendous chart by John Boehner, Robert Palmer released a well-designed visual aid to the Democrat’s health care proposal. At its best, information design can help the general public to understand a complicated issue. At its worst, as demonstrated by the House Minority Leader, information design becomes a tool for obfuscation and political maneuvering rather than education. Instead of muddying the waters with absurd “death panel” claims and confusing charts, Republicans should commit to an honest debate about policy and ideology. Of course, that’ll never happen: they’d lose.
(Via idsgn)