The power of pictures

[Graphic of US government spending by Jesse Bachman; click here for a very large version]


I wrote recently about the wonderful presentation done by Hans Rosling at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference last February in Monterey, California (if you haven't seen it, you can watch it here). His presentation allowed me to grasp and understand several facets of world health I hadn't known about in 18 minutes. Such is the power of great visuals.


Today, I saw a similarly powerful static image, a small version of which is at the top of this post. This one, noted by Occam’s Razor's Avinash Kaushik, is a visualization of the US Federal Budget, which apparently was posted and created by Jesse Bachman from Texas (at least, that's who claims the copyright). There is amazing detail in the larger 1.8 Mbyte version, but overall, it does a terrific job of communicating where the money goes and the relationships among different parts of the budget. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is. This graphic tells a financial story in ways that numbers and bar charts just can't.

Technorati Tags: Communication, User experience, Visuals