Today’s MOTD is a polar graph depicting monthly gas prices per barrel from 1999-2008.

The bullet points are major events that influenced the respective price.

Today’s MOTD was created by Craig Robinson, a baseball and infographics enthusiast.

I love his clean, two tone color scheme and the simplicity with which he provides information.

Make sure to check out his site for more examples of his work!

Today’s MOTD is in honor of the king of pop. It was created by Ethan Hein and was uploaded to some major social news sites.

It shows the relationship between Michael’s songs and the influences they have had on other artists.

Today’s MOTD is an map of the major mass transit systems of North America.

I like this graphic because it does not show traditional boundaries, but one can clearly visualize the outline of N.A..

MOTD hits the century mark today with an infographic depicting the Iranian Political System. Amidst all of the turmoil in that country around an contested election, this provides the laymen a helpful context for understanding the news coverage that’s being blasted through all mediums of info. dispersion.

Provided by the National Democratic Institute, this simple black and white organizational chart is an easy to comprehend view on a somewhat messy political system.

What I found interesting about this graphic was it’s use of a principle often found in the art medium known as Comics. As professed by renowned cartoonist and theorist on comics, Scott McCloud, there is an ever-present opportunity to amplify key messaging through simplification. In other words, emphasis through subtraction.

This is one of many comic based principles that has relevance in the world of information design and information graphics.

If you take a look at the graphic, you’ll notice that the Supreme Leader and President not only are sized larger than any other entity, but are also the only elements not portrayed by silhouette. This, I propose, speaks to the disproportionate amount of power and influence held by two individuals in contrast to all other entities within the political system. Political value judgments aside, it isn’t hard to ascertain the focus of the infographic, especially due to the fact that the designer has utilized a ‘McCloudian’ principle of amplification through simplification.

Today’s MOTD is from Advanced Human Technologies.

The graphic shows factors that influence our lives in an ever increasingly technological world. Even the personal interaction node contains references to technology by using cellphone and email communication!

Envisioned by Todd Holloway, this graphic is based on the Netflix Prize activities, which is a project focused on improving the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their preferences.

The dataset was 17,700 movies and 31 gigabytes of user ratings. Holloway references the large red mass to be “junk movies”, which, when labeled as such, proffers an intriguing statement on not only quantity of quality films being produced, but also the challenge of promoting movies to the correct market segment.

An interesting thought would center around the manner in which movie promoters and distributors, like Netflix, are defining their market categories. This evidence in this visualization begs the questions of whether or not movie market segments ought to be defined with a more broad set of criteria than is currently being employed.

Today’s MOTD is a fun blowout graphic, from James Provost, depicting all of the parts that make a tazer work.

Today’s MOTD was created for a flowing data contest by Luca Masud. You can view his portfolio, uploaded to the Behance Network, here.

The graphic is a multi variant analysis configured into three lanes of information to represent wealth and poverty across the United States. The top chart is a xy graph with Poverty on the Y and GDP on the X. The middle lane is the state name, and the bottom lane is the state location.

Aside from the fact that the data can be considered skewed based on GDP per capita, the overall design of the graphic is fantastic. The reader can easily map their state from the bottom up to find out what ‘disparity’ level they are.

Living in DC I can understand the findings that our city has the highest GDP per capita (small city, large paychecks). It is also not hard to imagine that there is the most poverty from 0-18 when you walk around some of the ‘forgotten’ neighborhoods.

It would be interesting to map the district based on the same values and see if there is a ‘DMZ’ line where there is a clear distinction. Also, I would like to see the same study based on population and not GDP per capita.

Today’s MOTD is a graphic about the difference between humans and animals made by 5W Infographics.

The graphic utilizes white space very well making the data very available.