Wizardry

An anonymous reader dropped a comment pointing us to Martin Wattenberg's gallery at Business Week.  Martin's work falls into the category of information visualization, which typically concerns cramming as much high-dimensional data as possible onto 2D or 3D displays, augmented heavily by colors, shapes, interactivity, superpositioning and other tricks.  Often pleasing to the eye, these graphics usually take time to warm up to.  Sites like Infosthetics and Visual Complexity cover them well.

Martin is responsible for the baby names visualization, which tracks the popularity of names over the years.

Martin also created treemaps like this one.  Does this show relative stock performance better than other designs?