election:

How a genius election-related graphic came together

The other night, I posted this really amazing New York Times graphic breaking down the numerous roads to Electoral College victory Obama and Romney can take. Think the graphic was cool? Now here’s how they did it. In the words of the Times’ very own Mike Bostock:

The hard part of this graphic, implementation-wise, is the animated transition as you flip states. Although this is superficially similar to collapsible interactive trees I had implemented previously, it turned out to be more challenging due to the pruning below decision nodes. To assist my thinking, I sketched out a sample tree with eight different interactions and the corresponding animations. With examples, it was possible to generalize the behavior of the transitions and start the implementation.

Which road do you think the Electoral College is going to take?

— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog

Infographic creators aspire to create something this awesome. And here it is.