ONS Digital

December has been a particularly busy time for our editorial and design teams (who are working more and more closely together to provide a combined ‘data storytelling’ service to our statisticians these days.)

We released our ‘5 interesting facts about alcohol consumption in Great Britain‘, which seemed to be well received and showed up covered in various media outlets. The visuals were also picked up and reused which is something we are keen to encourage.

Something else we released this week was an infographic that supported some Census data about migration patterns. This was picked up by both the Guardian and Daily Mail websites (with both of them briefly featuring it on their home pages). The graphic was a real collaborative effort between the Census team, editorial and design and while you can’t please everyone it certainly seems to have gone down well. It was featured prominently on the Guardian Datablog and there are currently 421 comments there (thankfully most of these are about the data rather than the design – that is the point after all.)

We also released a couple of nice little animations as we experiment a bit with additional formats to widen the communication of our statistics. The ‘Are you an average spender’ based on our ‘Family spending‘ data seems to have struck a bit of a chord with a few people so we will look at what else we can ‘illustrate’ in that style.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE1ltNPDX-4

The other was a bit of a festive fun with our ‘Winter-themed baby names’ video today, including a very cute rhino (his name is Rhi-ons, apparently) to introduce our list of the top 60.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP6qR-ezXQU

That is it from us in Digital Publishing so I’d like to say Merry Christmas to anyone reading this and we’ll be back in 2014!