A Bird’s Eye View of the Market

I’m currently obsessed with data visualization.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often tend to discard the balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve its main purpose — communicate information.

Yesterday, Organic posted a wonderful list of data visualization examples and I’ve been enthralled by Wordle which creates very elegant “word clouds.”

Today, I discovered another wonderful example of elegant data visualization – It’s Smartmoney’s Map of the Market which provides a real-time, bird’s eye view of the entire market. It cleverly uses color to highlight the market segments which are up or down on the day. Beneath the surface is tons more data that you can drill down into, including news reports, market analysis, charts and competitive financial metrics. For me, it provides the perfect balance between design and function in communicating the exact information I need.

 http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/