In 2017, Max Fisher and Josh Keller at the NYT created a single chart to show the clear relationship between guns and mass shootings in the United States.

There’s nothing fancy or technologically remarkable about this chart, but its simplicity highlights just how remarkable the United States is in this regard. Simple annotations go one step further to remind the reader how the U.S. stands out.

In this article, Adrián Blanco and Artur Galocha, graphics reporters from the Washington Post, created an election model to help readers understand voting trends in real-time.

The site presents a fictional state—called Voteland—holding a race to select a new presentative from the Purple or Yellow party (much better than red and blue). The design choices of the article make it easy to follow how election modeling works, how votes are reported, and how the media declares winners on election night.

This project, produced by Matt Daniels and Russell Goldenberg for the Pudding, tracks temperature records in over 400 cities.

After choosing your city, you can either use arrow keys or tap to proceed through the slideshow, which includes graphs that show daily high temperatures and how they compare to other years.

Technically, this reminded us of this recent piece from the team at NYT, which also utilized the “tap-to-continue” slideshow approach. (Anecdotally, this format for presenting visual information seems to be growing in popularity—check it out!)

The USA Today graphics team has put out another impressive article on an important topic—this time documenting the human rights abuses at play in China’s detention of Uyghurs.

The article begins with an image of a single person in detention—Tunsagul Nurmemet—and then shows how her experience is representative of detained Uyghurs in general. The piece does a great job of showing the magnitude of evidence that was recently given to media companies by Adrian Zenz, and humanizes this data with mugshots, quotes, and individual stories.

The NYT has published another stunning COVID-19 piece. For this article, they asked readers to submit the last text messages their loved ones sent them before they passed away from COVID-19. As a reader scrolls to the bottom, the death toll increases, and context is provided behind the last exchange between the deceased and their family. It is a touching and humanizing tribute to those whose lives were cut short.