How common is your birthday?

Not all birthdays are created equal… in fact, for most countries in the north temperate zone, more people are born in summer (May – August) than in winter (October – January). This heatmap allows you to check how popular your birth date is. It shows the number of people in Belgium for each specific birthday.

There are some interesting outliers: January 1st and July 1st are extra common, because people with an unknown birth data are commonly assigned these birthdays. The national holidays (May 1, July 21, August 15, November 1 and 11, December 25) are clearly visible as dips in the data. And obviously, February 29th is also not very popular!

We haven’t figured out why more people are born on the 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th and 25th of each month, but possibly this has some administrative reasons as well…

Man using a calendar for remembering an appointment

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Uncommon chart types: Slopegraphs

Slopegraphs appear in 'serious' newspapers, but they are very easy to create yourself. Use them if you want to compare how values have changed between two different points in time!

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Data visualization in a time of pandemic – #6: Viral scrollytelling

In this final chapter, we’ll dive deeper into some of the insightful stories which have been published about the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than looking at single charts, we’ll highlight some long-form stories about the origin of the virus, how it works, and how it spread.

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Five steps towards improving your dashboard

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Dear Data: Dataviz book review

Last February, on a cold and rainy day, I received the Dear Data book as part of a Dataviz Drawing workshop by Stefanie Posavec. A pretty large and heavy book, the kind you could put on your coffee table to show off (which I did!). Let's review it!

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Data visualization tools: Datawrapper

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Uncommon chart types: Waffle charts

If you thought a pie chart was the only food-related chart type out there, think again! Waffle charts are a great alternative.

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