10 Best Data Visualizations of 2016: Elections, Olympics and Climate Change

data journalists, scientists, and tech professionals pulled out all the stops last year when it came to creating incredible visualizations. We experienced an explosion of small high-quality publications and emerging technologies, pushing the boundaries of individual creativity and visualization design.

We’d like to share our list (in no particular order) of the best data visualizations of 2016:

The U.S. presidential election brought many surprises in 2016, along with some fantastic visualizations. This graphic from The Wall Street Journal offers a look at how Republican or Democratic each state has been from 1980 to 2012.

The Panama Papers involved an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The explosive documents revealed how the rich and powerful are hiding their wealth in tax havens around the world. Explore the graphs from ICIJ.

This timeline of Earth’s average temperature by Randall Munroe of XKCD is the perfect combination of data and comedy. It even won gold in the ‘Data Visualization‘ category at the 2016 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards.

Nate Cohn and Amanda Cox made a series of interactive visualizations for The Upshot showing the voting habits of various demographic groups. They did a great job of visualizing the shift from 2004-2012.