Lately I’ve been more and more interested in charts and ways of finding visual solutions to show both data and information. This interest really started with the book Designing Programmes, by Gestner and my work created for this blog in the Kyoto series.
In this chart I’ve mixed the data from the oil prices in the last 10 years with the main events that influenced those prices. It’s not really updated (as it goes only to July of 2008), so sorry for that inconvenience.
By: Pedro Monteiro
10 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
[...] Observer: Observed on 12 Oct 2008 What type of events affects oil prices? [...]
[...] Nice Viz showing World Events and Oil Prices over the last 10 Years [...]
These (and any) events affect the price of oil far less than does the activity of futures and commodity traders…now that is a chart that would be interesting to see.
I guess you are right, but my first guess is that futures and commodity traders are a part of the market so the real affects for the change of price must come from outside the market. What do you think?
This is one of the most outstanding charts that I’ve seen in the last 55 years
of practicing graphic design!
However attractive it seems at first, this is a poorly conceived chart. It takes up more space to accommodate the rotational flow of time, and it is only legible at substantial enlargements. A straightforward line chart would be more effective, easier to read, easier to see trends, and easier to compare values from different times.
The Economist published a similarly misguided chart, which I deconstructed in Spiraling Down the Drain. At least in the Economist chart, there is a natural cycle in the 12 months of a year.
Hi Jon,
Thank you for your opinion. Of course I don’t agree with everything you’ve said but I do agree with some. It does take a lot of space, but even that is relative, isn’t it? I made this to be a poster, say printed in A1 so the type would be 14pt. But if it was to be used on a magazine, then it would be ilegible.
A straighforward line chart would be better to show every thing you’ve stated, but if you wanted to add the main events that affected the changes in prices, and if you wanted to had this events in days, and wanted to show the last 10 years…
Well, the way I’ve found to show all that data (and not only the change of prices) was with this chart – with all it’s faults (and it has some). I would really love to see how you would pick the data in this chart and make it like you’ve said. Please send me your solution and I’ll be more then happy to post it (yes, that is the goal of whatype to have diferent views for the same problem).
Once again, thank you so much for your reply and comment. Looking forward to ear from you and to see your solution.
All the best
Pedro Monteiro
Pedro -
Thank you for your response. I understand that different visualizations have different purposes and are intended for different media. Your radial chart is probably good for a poster, because it does attract attention. But even viewing it on a large monitor (larger tha A1), I found the labels difficult to read. The radial nature of the bars makes it very hard to compare results which are separated by more than a few degrees. For example, how does the dip in December 2001 compare to the peak of November 2000? Did it drop to 50% of the peak? 75%? It’s somewhere in that vicinity
I would like to take a stab at a reader-friendly form of your chart, as I often do as fodder for my own blog. In fact, I intended to do just that when I first saw it, but I do not have the data at hand, and the thought of manually digitizing it scared me away. If you care to forward me your data, I’ll put something together and share it with you.
[...] bloq Select Category Uncategorized News Ads Studies Clipper Event Oil Prices [...]
[...] few months ago, Pedro Monteiro of the What Type blog asked What type of events affects oil prices? To illustrate the changing price of oil over the past decade, Pedro built the following [...]