That’s also one of my favorite examples, but for sentimental reasons: it was the first time I met Shan Carter, who came to my talk on D3’s force layout. This eventually led to me working for The New York Times, and then some years later, Shan joining me at Observable.
I love this graph. I had just landed my first programming gig in a statistical startup when this was published and I remember how inspired we were at seeing it. It really opened our eyes to how useful animation can be in data visualization. So much so that we started migrating many of the graphs we had in R to D3.
Here is an example of a graph we did where we blatantly ripped off one of mbostock’s other NYTimes graphs:
That’s an amazing example! I’ve had the pleasure of trying out the mapping part of D3 for a client job recently and while it’s been a bit overwhelming, seeing demonstrations like that really show how powerful it is. And, to some extent, why it’s so overwhelming!
Here is my favorite example - try click the 4 buttons at the top:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012...