FDIC Bank Closings

I continued to explore the data sets at data.gov after I finished my Gov Data contest entry.  I stumbled across this data set that was nice and clean and obvious.  Sort of makes me wish I submitted this for the contest instead of the renewable energy visual.

Immediately from this visual you can see that bank closings increased dramatically starting in 2009 with the Atlanta region having the most closings for the last two and a half years.  Even when they had a decrease between 2010 and 2011 their percentage of banks closed for the year increased!  What is going on in this region?  If you click the plus button at the top of the FDIC region, you will see the states within the region.  Or, you can filter using the check boxes on the right to view only the Atlanta region.


A quick note about the design of this visual.  Circles are not necessarily the best way to compare amounts between categories or between dates.  However, with the sudden jump in closings I think it might work well for this specific visualization.  Also, the great thing about Tableau is the ability to hover over a data point to see the specifics of that point.  I have also been playing around with using percent of total in my visualizations.  I used size to visualize percent total in a previous viz, and I am using color to visualize it in this particular viz.  For whatever reason I feel that percent total can add an additional perspective to the data that is often overlooked.  The trick is, how do I best visualize this?  I think the color in this viz works better than size in the previous energy viz.

Let me know what you think!

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