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This week saw the final match of Rafa Nadal's storied tennis career, and what a career it was. Unbeatable on a clay court, and latterly the immovable object to Federer's unstoppable force, he was a sensational player with an absolute corker of a left hand. His rivalry with Federer, and later Djokovic, captured viewers across the world for decades and raised the profile of the sport immeasurably. A true sporting legend!
This week I'm starting with a round-up of great visualisations from our recent collaboration with Back to Viz Basics, which challenged people to use three sporting datasets to make a bar, a line, and a scatter graph.
In no particular order, Satoshi Ganeko is first up. Satoshi has used a minimal design to keep the focus on the three narratives that he wants to show. I like the addition of interactivity to highlight an individual F1 racer in the line graph, and Satoshi's choice of years coaching vs rank for the scatter plot reveals an interesting trend; that higher ranks are associated with more years of coaching but only to a certain point. Great stuff Satoshi!
Next, Raisa Hannus has packed loads of detail into three tiny, excellent graphs, all of which are on a common theme of Champions. I'm really impressed with the level of information in each graph - from the marginal bar graphs with the dot plot timeline for tennis champions, through to adding two annotations to the scatter plot (one for the champion of each axis). All three of these graphs are well designed and use distinct colours to help distinguish the different elements. Very cool!
Third on the list is Akane Okamoto who has used a single colour palette across all three graphs to make them all feel part of a single combined piece. Akane has elevated their scatter plot by using colour as a third dimension as well as the two axes, and used a stacked bar graph for men's & women's tennis champions per country, which is a great way of showing this information too. Akane has also used some technical Tableau features, from having dropdowns throughout to switch the dimensions being showed, through to customisable axis limits and vizzes in tooltips. This is a really neat showcase for all those features, and all three elements complement each other.
And finally for the pure collaboration section is Hideaki Yamamoto who has created a really innovative newspaper style design for their visualisations! This is an excellent way of being able to add extra information for the reader through natural use of headlines and explanatory paragraphs. Hideaki hasn't rested on that and has also created some really attractive visualisations that take the place of newspaper article images - and used some advanced secondary visualisations in the tooltips for each one too! Definitely worth checking this one out and spending a bit of time looking through it as it is full of clever touches and extra features.
A regular to these pages, Dan Wade has picked up the F1 dataset from the collaboration and created a dashboard focused on the battle between Hamilton & Verstappen for the championship. Both the bars and the lines show just how close this battle was, and Dan has cleverly added annotations to the key points too. I also like his design touch to colour the driver names in the title so that it can also act as a legend for the dashboard as a whole. I always like to see things like that which can really improve the reader's experience.
I'm going to round up with a couple of other sports visualisations that caught my eye. Lev Akabas has looked at triple-doubles in the NBA and how a small number of players are responsible for the majority of them. This is a smart and informative twist on the standard bar graph.
Lastly, Ella Tudome has posted some of their favourite visualisations from their portfolio, including a couple of sporting ones too. In particular, their Forbes Highest Paid Athletes visualisation is delightful! Really imaginative with lots of delicate design touches encoding stacks of information too. I can imagine it would look excellent as a poster and I will be coming back to look at it a few more times at least.
And that's it for this week! A great week of collaboration and ingenuity - both of which are things we love to have the opportunity to promote through #SportsVizSunday.
Mo & the rest of the #SportsVizSunday team
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