I've always wondered how Singapore's The Straits Times produce their infographics. It's nothing stunning like New York Times', but the baseline quality is not too bad, and they are interactive as well. Plus, their palette is quite pleasing to the eye, so I've always wondered if they employed some graphics designer behind it all. You know what? I thought too much.
First, let's take a look at an example of their infographics. I found a pretty good one on Tracking Covid-19 Cases in Singapore. Generally, their infographics are neat, robust and interactive, pretty good standard I'd say.
Well, after examining the underlying HTML, I realised that they employed a web API service by the name of DataWrapper. And guess what, it's quite easy to implement in JavaScript on websites! In addition, they actually provide a user-friendly high-level interface for simple charts, just like the ones produced by Straits Times.
And you know me, I just had to try this out. So here's a chart that I replicated from the Straits Times link above, and I must say it was not much effort at all to produce a chart that looked quite easy on the eyes:
That's all for today really, just wanted to document this tidbit down somewhere. I'm sure it'll come in handy one day for certain publications.
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