The Facebook Offering: How It Compares - The New York Times
I really liked how pretty much the same data was presented sequentially to present the central story, all without a crazy amount of effort. It's a bit slow, but it is nice to see the same points staying consistent and moving across different charts instead of re-rendering entirely. I also like the manual selection of companies (Apple, Microsoft, and Google) highlighted to serve as comparisons to Facebook. I thought the animation was a bit too slow overall and that there were perhaps too many data points shown. The smaller points help paint a picture about the general trend, but at the same time, it's also information that very few users would actually click to explore and it makes the overall chart a bit crowded as a result. Lastly, the highlight for the selected circle isn't very noticeable, particularly when you're searching for specific companies.
The core of the visualization is our favourite D3.js (and it looks very much like our circle charts). Instead of using iframe, the JavaScript code is actually just embededded on the page like we have been doing so far in class, but obfuscated. Looking at the unobfuscated code, a lot of the D3 code looks familiar. The variable names aren't terribly descriptive (probably due to the initial obfuscation), so it's a tad annoying to get a sense of everything that's going on. There is a bit of jQuery action going on that takes care of the chart changes and the search function, which I would love to learn how to use for
filtering out data.
Overall, I think it's simple enough that I could give it a try, but I like how much story it tells with a much simpler visualization than most of the "cool" projects that I saw online. Link to the story.
Honourable mention: "The Wizards' shooting stars" from The Washington Post. I really liked the page when I first encountered it last year. When I looked into it, they have pretty much element in the page pre-rendered as images and the selectors change the images beingn shown on the page, so I did not select this work. I really like how the elements rearrange when the page width is rescaled; I would love to find out how to achive it for my own work as well.