While reading a news article I came across a US state cloropleth that piqued my curiosity.
An economic news article on state unemployment rates at The New Republic included a state level map with a two color scale and tooltips. As always when I see a new chart that I like I look for two things to steal; the data and the method used to make the chart.
In this case I was in luck. The embedded chart included links for both the method used and the data (great features of Datawrapper).
Datawrapper.de is a set of open source visual analytics tools (mostly Javascript from what I've seen) integrated into an easy to use UI. For those of us still learning D3.js this is a great way to build beautiful, interactive charts with the style and capabilities of the D3 style graphics which are used by many online publications and bloggers.
State level maps (Maps still in Beta at time of writing) are really easy and fun to create. To build you simply start by uploading or pasting in your data. I was able to simply paste in two columns of data, state abbreviation and value. Using R this might have taken me fifteen or twenty minutes or so, at Datawrapper this only took five
I took another stab at this data, trying out one of the line chart templates provided. Here I wanted to try to mimic (substance not style) one of my most favorite data tools, FRED:
Following similar steps to the state US map above I simply pasted in the time series data from FRED and moved through the Datawrapper wizard. I simply selected line chart then updated a few options to better mimic FRED (sadly the iconic recession shading is not available natively, or grid lines). In some ways the result is even more aesthetically pleasing, and could be a nice easy addition to a blog post or article
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