-: All right.
Last but not least, I wanna talk about the small details
of animating stuff and/or using small multiples
or other ways of really expressing your data
very effectively.
And I mentioned this research earlier.
The fact is we love animation.
It is engaging.
You should animate stuff if you can.
At the same time if I really want my audience
to accurately understand data like over time
or comparing a whole bunch of different things
at the same time to each other,
small multiples is also very effective.
So, you know, think about it.
Use animation for engagement,
but precision and accuracy of memory of the data,
sometimes small multiples is more effective.
So long story short, animation.
Animation is eye candy.
It is engaging.
So I showed this, that visualization, you know,
just a still shot of that final result, a part of it.
But here's how that data story opens,
drowning in plastic.
And if you look up here in the upper left hand,
first of all, this is really cool that this is happening.
Since you've opened this page
270 whatever thousand plastic bottles have been sold.
I just opened it.
So look at the volume, the number of plastic bottles.
And if I keep this open for a full minute,
eventually it hits a million, and the message changes.
It says a million bottles every minute.
But the animation is just like striking.
Like I can't turn my eyes away from it.
As I keep going, you know, we essentially see
like the results, the finished state
of what that animation would do
if I kept it running forever.
And then we end up with that final image
that we looked at before.
So I get it.
The engagement is just at the top, very effective.
It's engaging.
It's eye candy.
It's sexy.
I wanna look at this thing.
That's enough of a reason to animate stuff.
It really is.
On top of that, and I mentioned this briefly previously.
Reuters, you know, it's all about the brand, right?
That white gray background and that pop of blue,
so many of their visualizations use this color palette.
You know, having a strong brand, a way that you use color,
whatever, you know, design decisions you use,
having a style is a good thing, right?
It's fine, it's wonderful.
Cause then people get to know what you're doing
and how you're doing it.
Anytime I look at Reuters,
I know the blue thing is gonna capture my attention.
So it's sort of like attentive processing
like I've mentioned a couple times, right?
I'm primed to look for that blue
anytime I open up a Reuters graphic.
So animation, very powerful, very effective.
This is an example.
This is looking from the New York Times,
essentially looking at kids.
If you are a kid who grew up rich, what happens?
Do you end up rich or do you end up poor?
Or do you end up somewhere in between?
And what this visualization is showing us
with a very slow animation is how if you're black,
which are the blue squares,
you're much more likely to end up poor.
If you're white, you're much more likely to end up rich.
So not only does class actually dictate
whether you're gonna be rich or poor for sure,
but even then race still plays a huge role
and the animation is totally superfluous.
They could have simply showed us some stack bars
and been done with it.
But the animation is kind of fascinating,
and it sort of reinforces the idea
that you sort of fall from here down to here.
Essentially it's a Sankey diagram, right?
But it's an animated Sankey diagram.
Very interesting and effective.
My only pet peeve with this particular project
which I really do like
is why didn't they assemble
these little stacked charts over here
as actual stack diagrams?
The fact that they end up as a strip plot
doesn't help me really see as effectively
the percentage share, sort of the end result here.
That would've made this like perfect.
But the animation's kind of cool.
And this is used, you know, throughout this presentation,
other ones.
If you grew up poor how likely are you to end up rich,
et cetera, et cetera.
You will notice, by the way,
like I talked about with redundancy,
every time throughout this presentation, this data story,
of course the blue means black.
The yellow means white.
It would be weird if they switched that up.
Of course, of course, of course.
So nice use of animation throughout this data story.
Another example, and I think I've shown this one before.
This is a project that I did.
This is just an example of eye candy, right?
I'm gonna refresh the page.
As I load this graphic, I make it animate into place.
It would be so easy to just have everything there,
but everything animates into place.
I animate things like I have the pulsing dots.
So that shows you which line is the active line
at this moment.
Every chart that I create,
every when it's an interactive experience,
always animates into place.
And I delay the animation.
So the first dot maybe does something,
and then later dots do it a moment later
so you can see how they, it doesn't happen all at once.
It happens sort of in sequence.
It's a subtle little thing, but it makes a huge difference
from a user experience standpoint.
Same thing with this one.
Everything sort of flows in one by one by one.
Those little details make a huge difference.
It just feels satisfying to look at.
So for you all, when you're doing your capstone projects,
if you're creating something in say, PowerPoint,
or if you even have time to create something, you know,
in another tool, and you have the ability to,
and the time, and the technical skills to animate it,
you should totally do that.
If you don't do that because you don't have the skills,
the time, you're not even doing it in software.
You're doing something more analog
that's 100% okay.
But tell me in the description what you would animate
if this was a real final deliverable for an actual audience.
So help me understand how you might use animation
and interactivity or anything else
to really bring your stories to life.
Cause those little details can make, you know,
really push you over the edge from like a good data story
into a really something, you know, special.
So that's all I got.
Thank you all so much for being here for this class.
I cannot wait to see your projects come to life.