This remarkable piece of visual storytelling from the team at NYT stitches together maps, videos, and prose in a scrollytelling showcase of the reasons for Russia’s failure to capture Kyiv. Maps with descriptive annotations provide important geographic context, and the videos embedded throughout transition smoothly so that the viewer understands their connection to each geographical place referenced via map.

Data illustrator Sonja Kuijpers, through STUDIO TERP, has designed a wonderful one-page infographic for Popular Science. (It was designed last fall, but we just came across it this week!)

It combines three chart types: line charts (with points as bubble for flare), connected scatterplots, and stacked circles to illustrate how birthrates have dropped precipitously since the mid 20th century, and how these declines have been felt differently in different places. In particular, each chart makes clear that higher-income countries have the lowest birthrates (with nice annotations explaining why), and that this has remained true over time.

A unique chart from Georgios Karamanis showcases the rise of gender-neutral names in the United States since 1880. A series of overlapping lines, each representing a name, illustrates its point through density. Although this type of spaghetti chart would usually be inadvisable, the concentration of lines around a certain y-axis point suggests a concentration of gender-neutral (or not) names.

Near the end of the chart, in the 2000s, we see a dark concentration of lines near the middle of the y-axis, suggesting that new names are converging toward gender neutrality.

A nice scrollytelling piece from Niko Kommenda and Philip Georgiadis at the Financial Times takes us on a journey to show how the world stopped—and resumed—air travel during COVID-19. The story leverages two scrollytelling charts; one of a world map and one of a line chart. Importantly, these charts’ canvasses remain fixed in place, and the scroll-based interactions only add or highlight data on top of the chart, making for a nice and consistent user experience. (This story may be behind a paywall.)

Here’s a topic we knew nothing about but are now obsessed with: plant visualization. The artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg uses an interactive 3D visualization to answer the question: “what would a garden look like if it were designed from a pollinator’s perspective, rather than ours?”

Find out for yourself by building your own pollinator-inspired garden, or read more about the project here.