How The Wall Street Journal Put Graphs In Their Tweets

by | May 9, 2011

WSJ Graph Tweet

I love to see innovation and creativity in the use of social media. This new series of tweets from WSJ.com is no exception. Using unicode characters to display the up and down swings of the unemployment rate is genius.

They don’t have it down to a science, and who knows, it might be a gimmick we all forget in a week. But, this is the type of creativity that pushes all marketers to make social media work for them.

Sparklines, according to Edward Tufte, who invented them, are “small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images.” Among designers, there’s general agreement that sparklines are fantastic for conveying time-series data, particularly financial and economic information, in primarily text-based media like stock tables.

Read the full article here by Zach Seward.

PSSST…

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