Elisabeth Bumiller’s recent profile of Jeremy Bernard, the first man and openly gay person to be the White House social secretary, used an interesting dataset: a list of everyone who has attended a state dinner in the Obama administration. I don’t have a ton of experience with Styles (or with “style”, for that matter), but this was a good chance to do something different with a new section. Except not that different, since charts are pretty much the only trick.
Alicia Parlapiano and I ended up using a sort of spiral plot, which we then just joined together in illustrator. I remembered that we had used a similar technique in one of my first graphics at the Times to visualize which countries were good at which sports. (Then, as now, Amanda did the hard stuff.) So I ported the code from Actionscript to use for this, while also sizing for frequency of visits.
Here’s the sketch:
And how it looked in print:
Matt Ericson and Amanda Cox helped out on a late night to make a fun interactive version, perfect for gawking at all those people who were invited instead of you.
