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I found there were a lot of difficulties in getting my idea down electronially compared to sketching. It is difficult to control color and axis within the constraints of the flourish system. For example, I wanted to add y labels to the heatmap and sort by country but it turns out that this functionality does not exist for that chart type.
I used a white-to-red color scale, with darker red representing more debt, since debt is generally bad and no debt is neutral.
The first data visualization does the best job of letting you instantly compare which countries are currently holding the most debt, and it allows you to quickly compare the state of different countries. The second visualization is not quite as good for comparison, but you can also see how each country has changed over time by viewing it, so it makes up for the lack of clarity with a additional information. The final graphic also provides the additional information on the time scale by using a heatmap. I choose this visualization because I wanted to see all the data at once and felt that the second graphic was too spread out, with so many different charts. The colors in the heatmap highlights the countries that are most in debt and the side by side comparison helps to compare countries in a given year with more ease than the second graphic. It’s instantly clear that japan’s debt is huge compared to the others and has stayed that way for a long time. However, and while our eyes can see which of two colors is darker, it’s hard to grasp how big these differences are as compared to the other charts.
Overall, I think the first chart is the one I would want to show unless there was a good reason for me to want to show global patterns in government debt over time. There are some local patterns, but they would be better suited to a chart that only looks at one country, since it is a bit too overwhelming.