Regional Plan Association reports are jammed packed with data.
Reports feature data related to why people ride the subway, subway car lifespan, jobs generation projections, housing construction trends, user satisfaction and more. They needed a way to communicate their research to as wide an audience as possible. The choice fell to everviz in 2020.
Their charts feature subtle color choices that highlight key insights, interactive tooltips, and animations. They use a wide selection of everviz charts, from bubble and column charts to scatter plots and donut charts. The chart plot area often features a stylish grid design.
Here, they share their philosophy for communicating research with charts and graphs, which involves engaging as many people as possible on different platforms.
The challenge
Regional Plan Association is an independent non-profit organization that does research, planning, and advocacy to expand economic opportunity, environmental resilience, improved health, and a better quality of life for the New York Metropolitan region. Since the 1920s, we’ve produced four landmark regional plans for the region, with the most recent being released in 2017.
RPA has a reputation for being honest brokers of truth, working toward a better future for the region. Part of that is collecting, analyzing, and presenting data. The way we’ve done that has changed over the last century — from pen-and-paper charrettes to digital assets.
When we were rebuilding our website in 2020, we needed a service that could help us make customizable, responsive charts for our research reports. The work RPA does also involves multiple stakeholders and covers multiple disciplines. We wanted a tool that would allow us to communicate our information to as many people from as many backgrounds as possible.
The solution
RPA chose everviz for our work because it’s customizable, versatile, and integrates well with Craft, the CMS we use for our website. Our brand and our visual identity have become large parts of our research projects, so it was important to find tools that allowed us to pick exact colors, typefaces, and so on.
Our research reports are also used across a variety of mediums. When we include charts and graphs in our reports, we want them to be responsive to different screen sizes and easily scaled for social media. The different export options that everviz gives the user allows us to use our work in a number of different final products.
The results
RPA has used everviz to write reports on congestion pricing speeding up travel times, the MTA’s capital plan, transit-oriented development potential, the potential of the Gateway program, and much more.
Our everviz charts are an important part of the stories we tell with our research — they allow our team to communicate dense information clearly, concisely, and in a compelling way. In that way, we’re able to reach wider audiences, from our following on social media to sharing with the press.
What tips do you have for other chart designers?
Our team recommends taking advantage of everviz’s forums, and not being afraid of the advanced options — hacking the system a bit has allowed us to make beautiful complex charts.
