My week-end and evenings spent staring at pixels paid off as Comprehensive Winner designation in Business Intelligence Network’s Data Visualization Competition. My entry included visualizations for all five scenarios, and I won the checking account scenario and tied for first in the freestyle scenario, in which I revised the old OWASA water graph. The analysis of the winners and other entries will be released later, and I look forward to reading them. Unless one of my entries for the other scenarios is highlighted as an example of what not to do.
The checking account scenario was so simple I almost didn’t enter it. It involved a checking account statement with only 7 or 8 transactions for a given month. I thought it would have been a better challenge to visualize a statement with dozens of transactions, some occurring on the same day. I did the simple visualization in a way that was scalable to the more complex case, which may have helped my entry.
I found problems with all of my entries soon after submitting them, but I thought the budget summary scenario was my best entry (PDF). Below is the updated OWASA graph (my JMP version, original OWASA version). Getting my contour colors from Color Brewer probably helped.
Congrats Xan. Now, can we get you to do some more political oriented graphs?
Just give me some data, Will …