DON'T TELL ME THEY ACTUALLY LEGISLATED

Detail of map

The New York Times did a nice job with the information design of the graphics showing how the Senate voted to repeal the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. There was an emphasis on clarity here, as the details were kept to a minimum and the graphics were boiled down to bare minimum. For example, the designer used the typical red and blue colors to indicate party. But s/he did so in such as way so as to keep those colors, using slight modifications, to indicate three different data sets: Yes, No, and Didn't vote. It was smart to group the "No" and "Didn't vote" groups vis-a-vis desaturated color. I do wonder, however, if the map would be an even easier read if the "No" squares had the diagonal lines in the fully saturated color. Or... perhaps the designer intentionally made the "No" squares desaturated in the same tones as "Didn't vote" so as to make the viewer optically group those together, leaving the "Yes" squares to stand out since they're the only saturated colors. This then creates an emphasis on the "Yes", which is to say the passage of the vote. It is subtle, but this designer manipulated information to propagate the "Yes" (it's about damn time!) vote.

I think that in the future, several generations from now, when we see maps like these, we'll absorb them in one whole visual gulp without needing to put together the parts to make sense of a whole. These graphics do a really good job of hastening that gap closure.