Maximising the data-ink ratio in a World Cup visualization
Many years ago a manager of mine introduced me to a fantastic book about data visualization, entitled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte:
You should go to a bookstore and buy this book, it's great.
One of the core concepts in this book is that of the "data-ink" ratio - the amount of ink used to represent data vs the total amount of ink used to draw the entire image. There are many examples of this throughout the book, and it's a concept that has stuck with me.
FIFA World Cup
We recently dusted off our FIFA World Cup Visualizer and released it as an app that people can use in their sites. In this app we're particularly pleased with the group stage visualization, because we think it has a satisfying data-ink ratio:
For a given team in the group stage, this visualization lets the user track 10 discrete pieces of information: