RJ's Inspiration #021 💧

RJ's Inspiration

weekly viz to inspire you too

💧 WATER PIES
This cascading series of pie charts shows the distribution of Earth's water. It appears in The Illustrated Atlas of Wildlife (2009). A 2008 blogpost by one of the book's proof readers (link) gives credit for the pie charts to Andrew Davies of Creative Communications (link).

Pie charts are often derided in modern visual communication. 3D pie charts, like these, are rejected totally. This graphic is a wonderful exception. Its waterfall visual metaphor is perfect for the topic. The big idea—how rare and precious our water supply is—comes off well enough. You can read the numbers if you really want to know more.

I would very much like to refresh this concept with recent data and my own illustrative spin. Please let me know if you know any publishers who might be interested. Thanks to Maarten Lambrechts for bringing this illustration to my attention on Twitter (link).

🗣 NYC & DC EVENTS!
I will headline two public dataViz events mid-September. Both free events require advance registration. See you soon!:

NYC on Thursday Sep 12: The Ultimate Data Viz Debate: Andy Cotgreave vs. RJ Andrews
https://usergroups.tableau.com/nycdatavizdebate

DC on Monday Sep 16: Data Storytelling: a Multimedia Tour featuring RJ Andrews
https://www.meetup.com/Data-Visualization-DC/events/264317624/

👉 ARE YOU ENJOYING THIS SERIES?
Please reply directly to share your favorite viz, offer any advice for how this newsletter experiment can be improved, or say hello. -RJ