iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 15/09/2026

Clever use of a connected scatterplot to show rise in hot days over times for counties in the US www.nytimes.com/interactive/... Looks like heat lines radiating off a surface.

Connected scatterplot with line for each US county. Lines moving up and to the right

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 10/09/2026

Kids drawings as a proxy for cultural trends walzr.com/kids-trends/ Sorry, Baby Yoda.

Trend lines for topics and drawings of Baby Yoda

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 20/08/2026

The U.S. is $40 trillion in the hole. How we ended up here: > www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int... I like this genre of chart as backdrop and illustrations in front to reinforce and highlight.

Stacked bar chart showing revenue and spending with worker shuttling money and rain clouds for recession

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 14/08/2026

IKEA complexity index uses a simple formula of steps in the assembly multiplied by number of parts: > ikea.greg.technology Get yourself a PAX Corner Wardrobe for $1,755 and the manual split into 16 parts for ten and a half hours of assembly time come free.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 30/07/2026

Hand-drawn, retro video game guides, like a map for Ninja Gaiden > www.handdrawngameguides.com Fills every single checkbox from childhood.

Illustration of bird, leopard, and ninja with Ninja Gaiden 2-d scene in the background

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 15/07/2026

A geography game, so you can see how bad you are at pinning locations around the world > maptap.gg I am not very good at this game.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 09/07/2026

Plan your visit to US national parks with data: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/ame... I'm into the bulls-eye-looking charts that show visitor volume, temperature, and precipitation in a one-year span. Red border is where it's at.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 07/07/2026

Looking for the most "ethical" NBA championships pudding.cool/2026/06/ethi... Always fond of the traditional pile-o-heads method to visualize missed games and player importance.

Piles of player heads to show missed games. Biggest pile for 2018 Golden State Warriors opponents.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 08/05/2026

They should make a movie about that

Movie poster for Along Came Polly. Tagline: "For the most cautious man on Earth, life is about to get interesting."

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 08/05/2026

Divorce, by occupations: flowingdata.com/2026/05/07/d... Actuaries, professional estimators of risk and very on brand, are the outlier with the lowest rate.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 04/05/2026

Researchers estimate that a third of new sites use AI-generated text: > ai-on-the-internet.github.io That's one year ago. Not great, but I wonder what percentage of those new sites have any traffic and if the chatbots and AI-generated sites are just eating themselves.

"AI-Generated Text on the Internet from Mid-2022 to Mid-2025. The proportion of websites classified as fully AI-generated (red) and AI-generated or AI-assisted (purple) based on Pangram v3 detection applied to representative samples obtained from the Internet Archive. The dashed line marks ChatGPT's public launch in November 2022." - Dolezal et al.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 17/04/2026

Job turnover and tenure, by occupation, looking for who stays and who leaves the most flowingdata.com/2026/04/16/j...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 27/03/2026

How long Americans work the same job flowingdata.com/2026/03/26/j...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 16/03/2026

For the old heads, it looks like information aesthetics is partially back up circa 2014 infosthetics.com

homepage of information aesthetics, with the most recent post from 2014

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 05/03/2026

Why Americans are unemployed, by age an education flowingdata.com/2026/03/05/u... It seems there will need to be a +1 for the laid off category as of a few minutes ago.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 26/02/2026

These visual breakdowns of everyday objects by Bryan Macomber are super satisfying mechanical-pencil.com "An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us"

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 17/02/2026

Meaning behind the food by Taiwan Data Stories circa 2023 taiwandatastories.com/lunar-new-ye...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 03/02/2026

From the White House, a bar chart that starts at 80.2 to exaggerate change incorrectly. Beware of Base Stealer flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

Bar chart with exaggerated change between two years by incorrectly starting y-axis at 80.2.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 05/01/2026

New Year's resolutions for men and women that we will definitely follow through with this year flowingdata.com/2026/01/05/n...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 18/12/2025

Who we spend our time with is just as important as how we spend our time. With age, sex, and day of week, there are shifts in who we choose to be with flowingdata.com/2025/12/17/t...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 03/12/2025

Who makes more than you and the jobs they have, depends on your annual salary of course flowingdata.com/2025/12/02/w...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 05/11/2025

Difference charts to show the differences between different groups, which show difference in days.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 31/10/2025

Halloween logicals, still the best 10/31 venn

Venn diagrams as jack-o-laterns showing trick/treat logicals: OR, AND, XOR, NOR, NAND, and XNOR

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 28/10/2025

If we define middle-class income based on median, a la @pewresearch.org, what qualifies as middle income changes by state and household size flowingdata.com/2025/10/23/m...

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 16/10/2025

California pulls to the top for most expensive and Arkansas pulls down for lowest cost of living overall

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 16/10/2025

Cost of Living, by State and Spending Category flowingdata.com/2025/10/16/c... It's sortin' time.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 02/10/2025

Vermont, New Hampshire, and Montana, I was not familiar.

Bar chart showing percentage of adults, by state, who had alcoholic beverage in past 30 days. D.C., Vermont, New Hampshire, and Montana are around 60%.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 09/09/2025

With our old friend the beeswarm, we get a bottom-heavy distribution with bumps at the round numbers, about every $20k up to $100k in median salary. Then the jobs grow sparse.

Beeswarm chart showing distribution of median salary by occupation.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 20/08/2025

Still have this hanging out on the wall

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 29/07/2025

My favorite bit is the stacks with a Sankey flourish and water lines to indicate flow. This could've easily been five simple stacked bar multiples, but this little part shows that they care.

Stacked bars posing as Sankey diagrams showing most surface water coming from forests

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 29/07/2025

They went with the @scottreinhard.bsky.social flare, using 3-D elevation scottreinhard.com/Mapping-and-...

3-d elevation map by Scott Reinhard, in the style of the Statistical Atlas 1870, with modern data.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 29/07/2025

Notes of the 1870 Statistical Atlas of the United States, especially in the titles www.loc.gov/item/05019329/

Mosaic plots showing state population. More area for more population in 1870. New York the biggest.

Population map from 1870, concentration in the (modern) eastern half of the United States.

Title of population map. Smaller description with title "Constitutional Population" in largest print. Center aligned text.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 10/07/2025

If you see this, quote post with a robot that isn’t from Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who and Transformers

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 07/07/2025

National Weather Service, very important.

Alerts map from NWS for July 7. Flood watch in central Texas, extreme heat warning in southwest, heat advisory in northeast and northwest.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 24/06/2025

Neal Agarwal took it the other direction with an elevator to space neal.fun/space-elevat...

An "elevator" at 82 kilometers above sea level, viewing the Falcon 9 rocket

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 24/06/2025

In 2010, Bill Marsh used a similar method to show the depths of the ocean in the context of the Deepwater Horizon oil well archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes....

Oil well doing a mile down, then the titanic at 2 miles, eventually to deepest part of the Pacific Ocean 7 miles down.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 24/06/2025

A long graphic shows the scale and depth of the bunker-buster bombs. Scroll and scroll more, past the height of a 22-story building www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Graphic that shows depth that recent bunker-buster bombs can reach, eventually past height of a 22-story building.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 29/05/2025

The most common jobs by age and sex flowingdata.com/2024/10/02/p...

We are cashiers during the teenage years. Drivers come in all ages, whereas nurses and teachers enter the picture once they earn their credentials. Women who work in their later years are commonly secretaries.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 22/05/2025

Upside Down World by @rsimmon.bsky.social is a reminder that there is no spoon. I mean there is no up. www.mapcenter.com/store/p/upsi...

World map that shows Antartica on top and Greenland on the bottom.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 15/05/2025

World map with south on top and Brazil in center, from Brazil's stat agency. Do all countries do this?

Brazil in center, south on top, unlike usual world map with north on top.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 08/05/2025

Takes me back to the Cox classic from 2011 on dress sizes, mixed with hurricane traces

Measurements for bust, waist, and hip. Variations across brands even though supposed to be same size 8.

Past hurricane paths by NYT, compared against an incoming Hurricane Irma in 2017.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 08/05/2025

Into the silhouette traces by @graphics.reuters.com to show Met Gala dress patterns over the years www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Pencil-looking outlines of dresses from Met Gala from 2019 and 2024. A lot of flare in 2019.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 02/05/2025

Bloomberg with the maps www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Flight maps showing increased ICE transfers from northeast to southwest compared to previous administrations

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 11/04/2025

Yeah... same in safari, chrome, and firefox. No ad blockers, etc

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 09/04/2025

With stock markets (and your retirement savings) going every which way right now, the long view is a source of comfort. Biggest drops and recovery times for the S&P 500: flowingdata.com/2025/04/08/s...

Animated line chart showing recent drop in the short term but a movement up and to the right in the long term.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 21/03/2025

If you take away anything from this, I hope it is: our days our uncertain. Use that information as you like.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 19/12/2024

Supermarket parent companies and subsidiaries, or why all the sales and ads look the same until you get to local flowingdata.com/2024/12/18/n...

Networks showing Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, Target, Amazon, Alhold Delhaize, and Costco rule the supermarket kingdom.

Less connected and dominated for regional chains.

A land of free-floating bubbles in the local chain kingdom.

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Nathan Yau @flowingdata.com · 11/12/2024

About half of people rely solely on employer-provided healthcare. The rest purchase it directly, have public access, or use some combination: flowingdata.com/2024/12/10/w...

Squares showing relative scales of health insurance in the United States. 54% have private only, 25% have public only, 8% have no coverage. The rest have mixed coverages. Source: ACS 2023

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