all good points about the heat map use for this visualization. thanks for this post. at first glance, i thought the heat map was nice. but then having seen the simple line chart, the heat map does become very one dimensional. it loses out on being able to show the significant dips/spikes, which seems to me to be one of the most important findings here. @derek thanks for sharing your thoughts on plotting. very informative and helpful. tnx!

One of the rarer times I disagree with your complaints. I thought the original visualization did a great job presenting an overview analysis of a complex set of information. As far as structure goes, I thought it was done to be especially suitable for quick reads. The large chart provided sort by state and by population, which provided a great data point and comparative angle. Since as we know, more states doesn't mean more people necessarily. Would more sorting be good? possibly. I actually liked how they treated the sub-topics sections. They are essentially providing reporting analysis and conclusion with texts and quick-read charts. So it's not just throwing up data on a page and let people figure it out what it means. As a reader, I appreciate that I could just skim the sections and understand the points already.