The Art of the Chart

The days of boring Excel bar graphs are over. Flash is slowly, but surely, planting itself as the de facto medium to view statistical data. People love numbers and they love seeing those numbers looking all pretty even more. Flash has enabled data gatherers to give their statistics a good dose of ooh’s and aah’s.

Google, Yahoo and MSN {apparently they’re waiting for the Silverlight edition} are using Flash based charts to display stock market prices, Google even uses it in their Web Analytics service. There is also an open source alternative to display your content in a Flash chart, not too mention a host of paid ones. Some are even available on FlashDen.

Creative uses of showing data have been popping up on a regular basis over the past year or so, like this one on the NYTimes showing box office receipts for the past couple of decades.

Then, you have services like Quibblo which use Flash to power their polls, while displaying the results in the same interface, like this one below -

Probably the most creative charts around are the ones I’ve seen on Maani.us, these charts just make looking at data much more interesting.

I think I need to use one of these Flash charts myself to track my income and expenses. Sure would beat looking at it in Excel.