Scatterplot has a new logo! About time, since we’ve had the last one since December, 2016. Here’s the story behind our new banner and a brief history of scatterplot banners back to our launch in 2007.
Scatterplot’s first banner went up with the blog in 2007. Here’s how it looked (thanks, archive.org!):
Tina Fetner‘s post “my dog eats her own barf” is a great teaching tool for feminist critiques of the Ideal Worker, by the way.
That banner survived 7 years before the next banner update in July, 2014:
That one was replaced within two years.
That banner was resized within a year to this one.
And that’s how scatterplot looked for the next 3 years, until today!
our new banner and logo
Our new banner and logo make use of Alberto Cairo’s Datasaurus Rex and the Datasaurus Dozen by Justin Matejka, George Fitzmaurice (who were kind enough to let us use it). The Datasaurus is a fun device for teaching cautious interpretation of statistics. Always plot your data! It shows that the same summary statistics can describe vastly different patterns in the underlying data. It even comes with this nifty gif:
Yes, Anscombe’s Quartet demonstrated the same principle in 1973, but Anscombe didn’t use a dinosaur or a gif.
It will be no surprise to those who know us that Dan Hirschman and I thought the datasaurus dozen would be great for scatterplot’s banner and logo. Not even 24 hours later and Dan made it so.
