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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that some of the NYT visualizations are static graphics that normally, back in the print-only days, been done in Illustrator. Here's a map of Chicago killings done by Mike Bostock et al:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/02/us/chicago-kil...

I wonder if making static charts via D3js has some time-savings/production advantages when the dataset is large enough? Before you say "maybe they just wanted vector graphics that worked for high-res"...that's obviously a benefit, but not enough on its own to give the web devs a graphic that could've been done via the traditional means (many of the Times stories include static graphics as PNGs in the sidebar)

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I think you're right that there's a quantity of data where using D3.js will start to be more productive than doing it manually in something like Illustrator. It's an instance of a trade off that we're all familiar with: at what point is it worth building a tool instead of doing the task manually? It's also worth bearing in mind that the point where it makes sense to use a tool is reached more quickly with proficiency in the tool - if you have Mike Bostock working for you I imagine most visualisations will be easier to produce with D3.js!

I think the other significant aspect is the speed of iteration. In my experience, producing good visualisations takes lots of iteration and those can take a lot of time if you have to alter each data item by hand. I've often reverted to paper and sketched out a revision that's way a few times before going back to the drawing program. I think it's likely that it's much quicker to iterate using D3.js (in the right hands).

It's important to factor in the importance of reusability. When someone makes a D3 visualization, it is infinitely reusable and hackable. So next time you want to make a map of killings in Chicago, you have it ready to go, and you just plug in the data, rather than having someone re-make it by hand. When you're a news organization, where speed is obviously of the essence, this investment has to be a no-brainer.

As Bostock's incredible skill is deployed on a variety of visualization problems, the New York Times builds a library of visualizations and templates that they can use for the foreseeable future, as long as the data is in the same format. That is incredibly valuable.

I work for a web news network startup, and I'm hacking together D3 visualizations specifically because they're reusable. We're based in Chicago, and plan on doing crime segments, and my visualization will take public CPD crime stats, display them (hopefully beautifully), and then encode them with ffmpeg for web video.

For a second I thought these were killings done by Mike Bostock...

I guess that explains the recent decline of HighCharts and Fusion Tables users...

Back in the days, people used to draw graphic by hand. Then, tools like Illustrator help automate the creation of graphic. Vector graphic libraries are going to disrupt the landscape.

It is starting out as artisan tool for programmers to build data visualization. Overtime, we'll have reusable templates/components that speed up the creation process and reduce cost. Christophe's list is awesome. I reference it quite a bit :)

At some point, creating vector graphic will be just as fast as creating static graphic. Plus, much more flexibility.

My team is tinkering with such idea with http://vida.io. Here's a little demo video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_LDH1T1D1Y

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