what moves you?

March’s challenge was all about motion: using animation to enhance your chosen visual. We received 46 submissions by the end of the month, with the most popular tool used being Tableau. Just under half of all of our contributors used Tableau’s newly-released animation capabilities to create their visualizations, while another quarter used Flourish. The rest of our gallery this month was built with a variety of tools: Excel; PowerPoint; Power BI; R; D3; and even QGIS. The lesson to take from this is, as always, that it’s not important to use any one tool over another; it’s about finding the tool you are most comfortable with and having a vision and a plan for the communication you intend to create.

In the challenge, we let the definition of “animation” remain broad, to give our creators leeway to interpret the word in whatever way they saw fit. All that mattered to us was that the animation enhanced the communication—either it helped us focus on important elements of the piece, or it explained something that static visuals wouldn’t be able to explain, or it improved the overall experience of engaging with the information product.

We did, however, suggest a few ways that motion and animation could be used, and several of our participants took those suggestions to heart. 

Animation can grab and focus our attention, as it is quite a strong preattentive attribute. Andy used it to walk us step-by-step through the story of the debt that Americans carry; Klaudia animated icons that raced over time, to explain the lack of price incentives for people in Poland to switch to a vegetarian diet (this was a line chart race, unlike the several bar chart races we also saw); Rob C. used a perpetually-scrolling window to focus our attention on a rolling three-month period of weather data. 

Rob F. leveraged the focusing element of animation in his submission, but also a second principle: that animation helps us keep track of data when we transition from one type of chart or display to another that slices the data differently, or to another view. He took on a difficult-to-understand subset of the foreign exchange marketplace, and used animation both to highlight different vendors, and to demonstrate the difference when a new way of normalizing the data was applied.

A few of our participants used transitions over time on geospatially-plotted data to tell interesting stories. Claire showed where wind energy had been adopted over time across the United States; Luca started from a baseline several decades ago and used color transitions to show where the population was increasing and decreasing across hundreds of locations in Spain. 

Kevin used animation both for transitions and for a third purpose: responsiveness. His interactive dashboard let viewers explore various factors that could correlate with win percentage in professional football. Transitions between views of the data are smoothly animated; but in addition, when users switch from highlighting the data by single team, conference, or division, the highlighting also shifts smoothly from one color palette to another.  Keith created a scrollytelling interactive based on the Spotify listening habits of his coworkers, and he too used animation largely for reinforcing the selected actions of viewers. Clicking on certain parts of the dashboard animate lines that then reveal, and draw the eye to, the next section in the reader’s intended path.

Three other submissions notably transcended these suggested uses of animation.

Simon chose to visualize hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, from 1850 through the present day, which is a perfect application of animation; when you want to represent the movement through space of something, why not visualize it using...movement? A static view can show us where the tracks of these hurricanes were, after the fact, but the animation adds another layer of understanding.

Eddie, in his submission “un cafe, svp,” used visual representations of a coffee cup and various liquids to display what ingredients go into different types of coffee drinks. The animation mimics the action of pouring things into a cup, and that whimsical element both catches our attention and reinforces the idea that these are liquid components of a whole.

Finally, David used animation to demonstrate the phenomenon of moiré, which happens when different patterns of lines or dots are overlaid on top of one another, creating the illusion of curved lines. It’s a visual effect that is very difficult to imagine without actually seeing it in motion, and as such this application of animation is an ideal use case.

You can see all 46 submissions in the SWD community. As you browse entries, we encourage you to participate by leaving comments and adding datapoints to work you enjoy.

For those who did participate in the March animation challenge, we thank you and hope to see your submissions for future challenges as well.  And if animation wasn’t your specific area of interest...maybe April’s area charts challenge is more to your liking.

See you in the community!