Hello and welcome to the last Crunch newsletter of the year. Hope you are having – or are about to have – a great holiday.
We’re taking a break until the new year. So in this newsletter we’re going to go through some of our favourite data pieces from 2024, from the Guardian Australia data team and elsewhere (in no particular order).
Our favourite Guardian work from the year
***
Are things getting better or worse? And what makes someone rich?
The Guardian Australia data team had two of the three finalists for the innovation category at the Walkley awards this year. Nick and Andy won as part of a team for their Leaving Gaza interactive. Check it out here if you haven’t seen it.
This was our other finalist, a quiz where you have to try to draw the line on a chart to show how you think a particular statistic is going:
We also made this quiz on wealth and income, which was another of our favourites. While answering questions like “what does the average Australian earn?” and “what makes someone rich?” seem simple, in practice they are actually quite tricky.
***
Hand-drawn charts about family violence, and other things
This was the year we launched our One Big Chart format. We’ve drawn charts covering the rising number of vaping shops, why Australian homes are so cold, and the government support payments that are below the poverty line.
This chart seemed to have the most impact, judging by reader feedback. It illustrates how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly women, are disproportionately affected by family and domestic violence:
You can see more of our illustrated charts here.
***
Shrinking cereal, the gender wage gap and migration in Australia
In no particular order, here’s three more pieces we really liked this year, with a focus on datavis.
We used cereal boxes to compare how ‘shrinkflation’ is affecting your cereal, and making you pay more for less.
Net migration into Australia hit a record high in September. However, absent from many discussions was that a large portion of those high immigration numbers were offset by a decline in migration during the pandemic:
When Australia’s workplace gender equality agency released data on the gender pay gap at nearly 5,000 companies for the first time, we took on the ambitious task of trying to show every company in one chart. We used a stacked beeswarm layout to show the full distribution, which worked quite well.
Josh’s picks
***
Fully automated luxury mullet detection
We featured a bunch of amazing data and visualisations from the ABC this year, but it’s this deep dive into mullets in the AFL that I can’t get out of my mind. The design is spectacular:
But it’s also a great example of visual journalism’s potential to interrogate and bring new dimensions to something that’s staring us in the back of the head face.
***
The destruction of Gaza in 100 lives
Among the many maps and other visualisations of the destruction in Gaza, this piece by our colleague Mona Chalabi had a profound impact on me.
A lot of the numbers that journalists throw around are counting statistics, aggregates and other abstractions. Mona’s work is a great example of how we can use proportions and shares – still abstractions – to tell more personal stories.
***
Storytelling with art
No one has made me more consistently jealous this year than the graphics teams at Reuters and the South China Morning Post.
Among many others, Reuters did amazing stories (and illustrations) on flammable building cladding, the Indian election and tunnels under Gaza.
They also did not one but two stories on balloon warfare in the Korean peninsula: this one on balloons designed to drop leaflets and deliver broadcasts deep into North Korea; and this one on the thousands of balloons from North Korea dropping trash in South Korea:
The South China Morning Post recently published a beautiful and heartbreaking interactive about where Hong Kong’s domestic workers sleep. They also did an amazing story comparing the Paris Olympics a hundred years apart and another on single use plastics. But, most importantly, there’s the baby panda tracker.
***
It’s all linked
If there’s a single number from 2024 that will stick with me, it’s that 1.5 billion people faced dangerous levels of heat this year alone. Like many climate stories, heat and heatwaves are often treated as discrete events, which is what made this work by the Washington Post so valuable.
There were a lot of climate graphics and stories to choose from but I’m going to end with this New York Times climate tipping points piece – just because I’m jealous of the maps.
***
Nick’s picks
***
Olympic animations
Krisztina Szűcs’ animations of Olympic events were a standout. She produced animations covering swimming, fencing, and this visualisation of pole vaulting (see the animated version here):
If you’re in the mood for more Olympic animations check out our feature comparing the greats of the 100-metre sprint to an average person.
***
Abortion rights as a maze
I keep thinking about this piece, not least because the Guardian has been looking at access to abortion in Australia. Using mazes as a visual metaphor for measuring complexity is such a clever approach.
As I said when we covered this originally, I had a few issues with the maze-solving part of it, but in terms of design ideas, this is great work.
***
Some good line charts about various things
We feature a lot of creative and interactive datavisualisation in this newsletter, and sometimes less-than-perfect work if the ideas or data are interesting. However, it’s always worth noting that basic formats, done well, are extremely powerful. John Burn-Murdoch at the FT has made quite a few linecharts that have gone viral in 2024, in no small part due to his attention to detail.
This one shows the growing ideological divide between young men and women in various countries:
One of the best aspects is the informative labels to help people understand what is being shown and the points being made.
***
Two great data-driven investigations
Bloomberg’s investigation into AI bias ranking resumes was excellent. This is a growing issue as AI becomes more widespread.
The other data-driven investigation I thought was great was The Economist’s analysis of crash data from the United States. The data shows that increasing the weight of a car only increases the safety to the driver up to a certain point, but the risk of death to other people increases dramatically.
Bonus link
Please enjoy these festive datavis designs from Ann Pregler on Bluesky 🎄.
Sign up
If you would like to receive The Crunch to your email inbox every fortnight, sign up here.
