Graphic designer David Yun tackles CIA world religion data

The other day I surfed over to look at the graphic design portfolio of one of my closest college friends and former roommate, David Yun.  He’s now in the graphic design program at Yale and putting together a growing collection of work (employers take note!)

The project that really caught my eye was his visualization of CIA world religion data.  Besides it looking really sweet, I was interested because I worked on a paper with several other Princeton students last year that included the very same data in a study designed to test whether the World Christian Database was something academics should consider using (some already do, others think it’s rubbish–we concluded that it’s a decent source for religious composition data, but it has some particular weaknesses people need to be aware of).

Anyway, I liked Dave’s project for the same reason I really liked Gapminder and the New York Time’s State of the Union graphics:  they are all creative ways of displaying information.  Even if Dave’s project isn’t meant for the classroom, or even to make the data (immediately) easier to understand, it’s a lot of fun.

(Knowing Dave personally, I also appreciated the diagram he created of his famed Best Date Ever.)