In Praise of Graphjam

If you work in corporate America or in consulting, then you’ve seen your share of charts and graphs.  Thanks to PowerPoint and Excel, graphing anything has become way too easy.  Why talk about market share or profit growth or sales in text or bullet points, if you can show it in a graph?

Now, with Graphjam, you can express much, much more with the same types of charts.  As a regular creator and viewer of graphs and charts at work, I find Graphjam is a great spot for mid-day comic relief.

Graphjam is part of the Cheezburger network of 49 humor sites that post humorous (sickening?) photos from all different perspectives.  Each site allows users like you and me to post or create our own art and to vote and comment on others’ postings.  The Cheezburger network includes sites such as:

• I Can Has Cheezburger (lolcats) and I Has A Hot Dog (loldogs), which allow you to provide funny captions to pictures of, you guessed it, cats and dogs.
• ROFL Razzi, which does the same for celebrity photos
• Pundit Kitchen and Up Next in Sports, which offer the ability to customize photos of current event and sports
• Friends of Irony — seemingly contradictory signs in real life
• Ugliest Tattoos — no explanation necessary, but don’t eat before you visit

My favorite, however, is Graphjam.  Graphjam allows users to create pie charts, venn diagrams, line graphs, bar charts, and equations that tell a story you want to tell.  One of my recent favorites:

Each of us, however, has our own story that we can tell with a graph.  Here’s one I quickly created that conveys a simple reality.  Have fun making your own.