Creating Crisp Graphs for Mobile

According to comScore’s 2017 U.S. Cross-Platform Future in Focus, as of December 2016, 69% of digital media is consumed via a smartphone or tablet, with the remaining 31% going to desktop computers.

This is in stark contrast to data from late 2013, when the smartphone/tablet vs desktop media consumption battle was very nearly 50%/50%.

Digital_Media_Growth


Amidst the height of the digital age, sharp mobile graphics are more critical than ever.

So the next time you’re building a Plotly masterpiece, consider using our new “mobile” graph feature. It’s super easy and will ensure that your graphs look as fly on mobile as they will on the 100 inch big screen.

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Data Bites: 7 TV Shows that Jumped the Shark

There is a fine line between keeping your viewers interested, intrigued, and emotionally invested and crossing the line with a stunt whose main purpose is to spark their waning interest.

If a television series has pulled off the latter, it is (at best) fighting an uphill battle and, at worst, on its way off the air.

These critical junctures occur frequently in the world of TV entertainment, but the moment when a television show attempts to draw attention to or create publicity for something that is perceived as not warranting the attention it is known as “jumping the shark.”

Furthermore, the idiom typically refers to something that is past its peak in quality or relevance and popularity.

In this post, we sift through seasons’ worth of IMDB ratings for various shows that supposedly “jumped the shark,” including The Brady Bunch (1969–1974), Lost (2004–2010), Prison Break (2005–2009), Moonlighting (1985–1989), The X Files (1993-present), Dexter (2006–2013), and The Office (2005–2013).

Motivation for this post stems from articles on TheRichest, RollingStone, and SCREENRANT about TV shows that may have jumped the shark.

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Taking the World’s Pulse on Climate Change

As a meteorologist who doubles as a blogger and content creator for Plotly, I’m naturally drawn to data that deals with the atmosphere, both in the space of weather and climate.

A brief introduction: I’m Ben Noll (https://twitter.com/BenNollWeather), a meteorologist for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand. I routinely make short-term weather forecasts (minutes to weeks) and climate projections (seasonal to annual time scales).

The weather is something that never goes out of style: it affects all of us every day, in one way or another. You may not think of it much during the long stretches of dry and sunny weather during the summer and autumn — but when you get an unexpected 10 minute shower during your picnic, curse the weatherman!

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Teach Yourself Code-Free Chart Animations with Secret Messages

Plotly’s latest invention? Something akin to “invisible ink.” That’s right – Plotly users can harness our new animation functionality to create charts, code-free (!), with secret messages.

One of the earliest writers to mention invisible ink was Aeneas Tacticus over 2400 years ago. Since then, several others applied varying techniques to craft secret messages: Pliny the Elder and the Roman poet Ovid gave advice on the use of plant juices and milk to write secret messages, similar to what George Washington used during the American Revolution.

But this is not George Washington’s invisible ink – this is the 21st century edition:

1. Keep your hands clean: no sticky substances like plant juice and milk needed to create it.

2. No ultraviolet light needed to read it.

3. All digital! Super flash.

From this:

Invisible_Ink


To this:

Invisible_Ink


Plotly’s animated graphs can take your stories to the next level. And you don’t have to be a programming mastermind to do it. Though animations are supported in R and Python, you can also make them in Plotly’s GUI.

In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to use Plotly’s GUI to create code-free chart animations with secret messages and show you a few of our favorites. We’d love to see what you come up with! Tweet us @PlotlyGraphs.

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Bioinformaticians in Plotly

Bioinfo-what?! At Plotly, we’re proud of our diverse and talented user base. In this post, we show off the work of our bioinformaticians.

In case you didn’t know:
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combines computer science, statistics, mathematics, and engineering to analyze and interpret biological data.

Bioinformatics

Source: UCONN


Plotly happens to serve a large bioinformatics and biostats research community. These users leverage the uniquely interactive features of plotly charts for dendrograms, heatmaps, volcano plots, and other visualizations common in this field.

In this post, we show off 7 resources in Python and R created by Plotly bioinformatics and biostats researchers by way of a Spectacle Editor presentation. You can make a similar presentation with your Plotly graphs.

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3 Minimalist Dashboards with Great Style

“Dashboards have become popular in recent years as uniquely powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized,” says principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge Steven Few.

“The greatest display technology in the world won’t solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you’ll never use it, even if it’s filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don’t let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.”

Therefore, instead of presenting a vertical “freight train” of graphs and content at your next board meeting, craft a “virtual display of the most important information needed to achieve your objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.”

Stephen_Few

Dashboard from Stephen Few that combines several bullet graphs along with Edward Tufte’s sparklines to convey a great deal of information in a small amount of space.

Surprise (& wow) your colleagues at your next meeting by using Plotly dashboards and presentations.

In this post, we show off 3 separate dashboards, influenced by Dribbble, FiveThirtyEight, and NTHSA.

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Turn Scroll-Fest into No-Mess with Dashboards & Presentations

When someone asks you how your weekend was, you don’t start off by (potentially) boring them with the unnecessary details of how your Aunt Sally’s train was late and you wasted your afternoon waiting – no!

Generally speaking, you’ll say “it was great” or “it wasn’t so good,” and then go into more detail if the asker inquires further.

We dare you to take this seemingly unrelated piece of advice and apply it to your blog posts and articles.

get_to_the_point


Instead of creating a vertical “freight train” of graphs and content in your next blog post, consolidate the most important bits and get to the point faster using Plotly dashboards and presentations.

In this post, we demonstrate how a PitchBook article, chock-full of cool graphs and informative text, can easily be spun into a Plotly dashboard and presentation.

The resulting content is:

1. In One Place: It is reported that web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. That should be incentive enough to produce a compact article and reduce the scrolling that is necessary. Plotly embeddable dashboards & presentations can help you accomplish this!

2. Social Media Gold: Set your data into action and make an animated GIF of your dashboard for Twitter.

3. Downright Stylish: Plotly graphs and dashboards use D3.js, the gold standard of interactive web graphics. See for yourself, below!

Dashboard: https://plot.ly/dashboard/Dreamshot:8424

Presentation: https://plot.ly/~Dreamshot/8423/pitchbook-1/#/?_k=tu4ldl

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3 Dashboards on Clean Energy

Plotly dashboards give you the glitz & glamour of D3 charts without having to write a line of code. They can match your brand perfectly and are shareable with simple web links. We wanted an alternative to the usual dashboard platforms that feel heavy, kludgy, expensive, and clunky. Plotly dashboards aren’t your dad’s dashboards: They’re built for today’s web and make you look like the smartest person in the room.

Dashboard


We present to you 3 Plotly dashboards on clean energy, with inspiration from The Economist.

________________


The United States is 2nd.

2nd usually implies something good; for instance 2nd place in a race, runner-up in a basketball tournament, or the silver medalist in an Olympic event. However, in the case of total carbon dioxide emissions, 2nd is not the place you want to be in.

The United States, in 2011, was responsible for 17% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. There is no question that population plays a role in CO2 emissions; however, the U.S. placed 3rd in the per capita CO2 emissions category.

President Obama has unleashed a variety of aggressive tactics to reduce carbon emissions, such as the creation of new “clean energy” jobs and technologies and the initiative to make America more energy independent. In 2015, he announced new, historic carbon emission standards for power plants.

Despite his unprecedented steps to attempt to combat climate change, efforts –both domestically and internationally– may sadly be too little, too late.

It goes without saying that Mother Nature is pulling off some unprecented stuff of her own this year:



The globe is on track for its warmest year on record and no country is immune to the effects of a changing climate, not even the most isolated:



These interactive dashboards were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share dashboards, graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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10 Charts on Mars That You Should See

33,900,000 miles.

54,600,000 kilometers.

200 tons (400,000 lbs, 180,000 kg) of fuel. An average travel time of 2,760 hours (115 days). That’s roughly 69 round trips from New York to New Zealand.

MARS 👽.

Does the thought of leaving Earth and becoming one of the first inhabitants of the Red Planet tempt you?

Well, you’re in luck.

SpaceX wants to head there. To make “humans a multiplanetary species.”

“SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.”

SpaceX


But first, you should know a little bit about Mars … and the rest of our Solar System. That’s why we’re here.

These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

We’ve also made a Mars presentation using our newest addition to the Plotly-tool stable: Spectacle Editor (a joint effort with Formidable). View it here.

Mars

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A 2016 Blog Clog… Worth Posting Your Dialogue?

Over 4 million blog posts have been written today.

Blogs


Let that marinate for a second. That’s one and a half blog posts for every person living in the City of Toronto. That’s a post for every person living in Oklahoma, 2 for every person living in New Mexico, and 7 for every Wyomingite.

So… is it worth it? No simple answer: It depends on what you are after. If you are in search of piles of cash, overnight internet fame, and celebrity status … move along. However, if you are blogging on a passion of yours, find writing fulfilling, or otherwise enjoy storytelling – by all means, toss your hat in the ring.

We blog because we dig cool content, because its an outlet for our creativity, want to show off what our awesome users come up with, and frankly to show that we aren’t just a collection of coding nerds!

Motivation from this blog post stems from –you guessed it– another blog post. On Scribblrs. Without further ado, we present the data behind blogging in 2016…

Head here to view an interactive presentation of the post below using Spectacle Editor.

Present


These interactive graphs were made using Plotly’s web app. To securely share graphs and data within a team and make interactive dashboards, sign up for a Plotly Professional plan or contact us about Plotly On-Premise.

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Make Your Next Presentation Pop

Boring

Source: Campaign

Imagine: You have been working at a prestigious organization of your choice for 6 months. Not a newbie anymore, you are making noise and getting noticed. Kicking ass and taking names, really. Next thing you know, your boss is calling on you to represent your team at a board meeting. The 10-minute impression you leave on its members will greatly influence your team’s funding for the next financial year.

Sure, you could take the easy way out – slap together some bland PowerPoint slides, lots of text, little color, and surely not enough figures. Plotly and Formidable have a different view.

Introducing Spectacle Editor, the world’s first open source presentation editor.

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