I’m not sure about whether Edward Tufte would approve of this approach to the visual display of quantitative information (though I suspect that he would), but it’s pretty darned eye-catching. In case the writing in the legend is too small to show up clearly on your monitor, I’ll tell you that it says that the red indicates the proportion of Americans in favor of the war in Iraq, the white indicates the proportion of Americans opposed to the war in Iraq, and the blue indicates the proportion of Americans who don’t know where Iraq is.
To see seven other flags that apply this mapping approach to information display and to find out a little more about the approach itself, click here.