This one has definitely been trending for a while, but it’s safe to say that visualization is still top-of-mind for smart digital marketers. In this post from Marketing Land in January, Daniel Waisberg from Google predicted this year would see the amplification of data through visualization. Indeed, a quick Twitter search of #dataviz yields examples from current to comical. Regardless of its function, good data viz still needs to be simple, be engaging and tell an effective story.
Here’s a great recent example of simple, yet effective, data visualization by Antti Lipponen, posted by The Blue Reporters Facebook page, a marine environmental science news page. It combines a chart of temperature anomalies for each year from 1901 to 2016 to show changes over time. Warmer-colored bars represent higher than average temperatures for a given country, while cooler colors capture those below average. Here are the first and last charts side by side, and you can watch the whole video here:

This is a great visualization example because it takes a hot topic like climate change and distills the information down to the basics to tell an effective story. One doesn’t need to know the gritty details of climate science to see how temperature extremes have shifted over time through smart use of color and shape in this graphic. Now more than ever, it’s key to be able to tell a quick, effective and compelling story, and good visualizations will continue to do just that.