Great visualisation tips

I would like to share with you this article on the Harvard Business Review.  They give excellent advice to ‘make extreme numbers resonate’.  They give 3 examples to illustrate their tips:

  1. Challenge: Green Mountain sold 18 billion coffee pods in two years. How can you give people a concrete sense of just how many objects that is?
    HBR-Visual Huge numbers- R1601Z_VS_CUPS_B-1024x774

 

  1. Challenge: Only three in 10,000 high school basketball players ever make it to the NBA. How can you give someone a deep understanding of the rarity of that feat?
    HBR -Visual small numbers-R1601Z_VS_BASKETBALL-1024x584

 

  1. Challenge: Every year tens of thousands of people leave one U.S. city for another. How can you show changes on this scale when it’s so hard to keep track of complex movement? […]

 

HBR -Visual complexity -R1601Z_VS_MOVEMENT-1024x568

In the first example, they give tips to visualise huge numbers, the second one is for small numbers, but the the third one is really interesting, as it shows an extremely clear way to picture complexity.