7 Data Viz Sites to Inspire Your Creative Eye

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By Denise Lu2013-10-01 10:02:46 UTC

In the age of data overload, "big data" and "data visualization" are major buzzwords, and they'll likely grow even bigger as we gather more information on a daily basis.

With data visualization on the rise, we rounded up seven sites to help you find useful ways of interpreting big data, as well as infographics that parse information into visually pleasing graphics.

See also: 10 Fascinating Data Visualization Projects

These sites range from aggregation blogs to how-tos to tools that allow you to create your own visualizations. Check out the list, and let us know in the comments below what your favorite site is for data visualizations.

Image: Flowing Data

Statistician Nathan Yau edits Flowing Data, which is one of the most popular sites for infographics aggregation. Yau posts graphics of his own as well as notable others. Flowing Data is updated almost daily with interesting graphics and visualizations from third parties. However, what's most interesting about Flowing Data is Yau's commentary as a professional working in the field of data.

Flowing Data also features tutorials on how to make useful graphics and how to use the tools to do so. Yau's own work on the site is also licensed under Creative Commons.

Image: Information is Beautiful

With an emphasis on the visual aspect of information visualization, Information Is Beautiful's homepage features only blank, minimalistic renderings of data visualizations.

Featuring many in-house projects by London-based data journalist and information designer David McCandless, the visualizations include static and interactive graphics that break down data from news and current events. Most of the infographics, like the site itself, are clean and minimalistic, featuring simple shapes and colors that depict large data sets in digestible chunks. The site also offers direct links to its data sources.

Image: Visual.ly

Visually is a community platform for data visualization. Great for companies that need to make a graphic, the site will match your business needs with designers who can make the graphics. You can even go in with a basic idea and Visually will do the research and find data for you. However, aside from being a design agency of sorts, Visually also features all of its infographics on its site, which hosts more than 43,000 graphics at the time of this writing.

From these, you can filter by topics such as economy, social media or politics. Visually also has a social media aspect that allows users to like and comment on graphics, providing a community forum for designers. Most graphics also have source links to data for verification of accuracy and authenticity.

Image: Information Aesthetics

As the name suggests, Information Aesthetics is a blog focusing on the intersection of art, creativity and data visualization. It culls infographics from third-party sites, each of which is visually stimulating and focuses on aesthetics in addition to good presentation of information.

The blogroll features posts in a clean layout with partial screenshots of infographics. One of the oldest infographics blogs, Information Aesthetics also has almost 10 years of archived material. You can browse by date or author, or literally scroll through all the posts since its inaugural graphic from December 2004. You can also browse by categories such as Architecture, Collaborative or Open Data.

Image: Visual Complexity

Visual Complexity's goal is to showcase graphics that break down complex networks (across a variety of disciplines, such as science and digital media) into visuals that are easy to understand.

Launched in 2005, the site's founder, Manuel Lima, gathered many of the infographics as part of his research at the Parsons School of Design. The homepage features an eye-catching grid of partial screenshots of graphics (you can choose from two types of views). A series of filters are conveniently located in a sidebar, where you can filter by subject, method, trend, year and top authors. Visual Complexity has logged 777 projects, and counting.

Image: Chart Porn

A mildly tongue-in-cheek blog, Chart Porn curates a number of graphics, from simple charts to complex data visualizations, and drops them into posts with a one-sentence description. Many of the graphics come from news outlets such as The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

There are also a surprising number of financial and political graphics, fitting for a blog edited by an economist who doubles as an artist.

Image: Many Eyes

A project from IBM, Many Eyes is a community of datasets and user-made visualizations. Since users can upload directly to the site, there are large pools of both data and visualizations.

While the obvious downside to Many Eyes is the lack of confirmation of accuracy for every dataset, the site is great if you need to make your own visualizations from your own data sets. Once you upload your set, Many Eyes offers various methods of data visualization, such as text analysis (word clouds) and values analysis (bubble charts).

You can also display relationships with scatterplots, visualize parts of a whole with pie charts, analyze change over time with line and stack graphs, or map your datasets on specific regional maps.

Image: Flickr, RU3

Topics: contributor, data visualization, Dev & Design, Tech