With Election Night coming to a close and Senator Barack Obama declared as President-elect, I figured I'd spend a little time re-surveying the infographics of some of the major online publishers. This is by no means comprehensive, and doesn't consider a lot of the interesting visualizations that some folks are doing. I consciously stuck with the mainstream to see how design innovation was trickling down into conservative publishers.
So without further ado, let's start with the New York Times:
If you remember my original post, I favored the tabular displays generally over map-based views. My favorite part of this is the electoral vote tally on the left-hand side. To me, the most important information is the electoral vote tally and the Times has done a good job of highlighting this both by making it a larger font and putting it on the left-hand side. Then as my eye moves to the right I can drill down to state-by-state detail. The color codes provide a nice way to get a "feel" for the state of things at a glance.
Next stop, CNN:
What you don't see here is the completely unnecessary animation of the left-hand counters like some alarm-clock from the seventies. The other three panels "flip" to various local races. Instead of using space show multiple data-points, CNN chose to use time. This feel like a real waste of space and my time. When compared with the Times site, there is really no contest.
Let's move on to MSNBC. These guys get bonus points for including the Senate races in aggregated form—a nice touch if you want to take the pulse of all the races. This is a nice tight display of a lot of information.
Again, I could do without the map. It's not that I don't like maps (I like them quite a bit), but they don't tell me the most important information—the electoral college votes. It's interesting to see the geographic proclivities but it's essential that I know the electoral college votes. The geographically large, but sparsely-populated states in Big Sky Country and the Midwest distort our initial perception of the data. Their size belies their actual value in the race and so we have to constantly look elsewhere for electoral college vote totals. Unfortunately, this graph doesn't tell that story. I can't look at Ohio in this chart and understand its value in the race.
Next, the Washington Post:
This is pretty uninspiring and uninformative. Oh look! Pictures! Just in case you forgot what the candidates looked like. However, if we start clicking the tabs, we get a little more meat:
I'm not sure why the map is all-gray, but the I like the bar at the top. This seems to be the new trend this year in info-graphics. I think for highlighting the changes in the balance-of-power, the line chart does a good job.
Now we move onto USA Today…
That's it folks. That's all you get on the front page, up in the right-hand corner. I think that pretty much sums up the estimation the editors of McPaper have of their audience. Let's, for a moment, try to treat this with a serious eye. Could somebody please explain what the blue boxes on the right-hand side are for? Do you click them? What do they do? Why are they the only ones shown? Can you see others? This is what Edward Tufte would call "chart junk".
On to the once-venerable Wall Street Journal…
Same old map, so few details. I can't tell if the lack of titles on the shapes indicates that the Journal's editors assume their audience can actually tell the states apart, or that they just couldn't be bothered. Like the Washington Post we get the candidate's faces. While it fits the Journal's famous stodgy etchings theme, it doesn't bring much information to the table. Oh yeah, just in case you lack the skill to compare numbers, the big checkbox next to Obama's name serves to tell you who won. Sheesh.
One interesting note is that this is the first infographic of the major sites I surveyed that included results for any of the other candidates. It's interesting to note that just the simple quantity of digits gives you some idea of the magnitude of the votes the two major-party candidates get.
Check back in four years and we'll do it again!