Also: Mapping the Iran war’s trade disruption
May 12th 2026 For subscribers
Off the Charts
The best of our data journalism
Marie Segger
Data journalist and interim special-projects editor
For more than two months the Strait of Hormuz has remained all but shut. Each day it remains closed, the burden on businesses and consumers grows. Most Americans feel the impact of the war at the petrol pump. But it’s not just oil that isn’t flowing anymore. From fuel to food, many industries rely on trade that passes through the strait. We have mapped the impact of one of the largest energy-supply shocks in history.
More of our data and visual reporting this week:
New data from SIPRI, a think-tank, show a big shift in military budgets. Sondre Solstad explained that, when adjusted for spending power, America’s allies now outspend Uncle Sam for the first time since 2001.
Britain’s new rent act came into effect on May 1st. The new law attempts to tackle genuine insecurity, but it could have unintended consequences. James Fransham laid out what is changing for landlords and tenants.
Below Rosamund Pearce explains how projections change how we perceive objects. She shares how she chooses the right angle for diagrams in our interactive articles.
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Let ’s keep things in perspective
Rosamund Pearce
Visual data journalist
We’ve written much about map projections—how we translate Earth’s curved surface onto a flat image—in this newsletter. But what about other three-dimensional objects? We often use diagrams and illustrations to tell stories. To create a 3D model of, say, the anatomy of a leaf, we also need to decide on a projection.
The cabinet projection is often used in instruction manuals
Oblique projections are useful when one face of the object should remain undistorted. In the military projection above, the top of the cube remains square, so you can show the height of a building while keeping the floorplan in proportion. Our cutaway of a leaf (see below)—while more organic in appearance—follows a similar logic.
We left the front face (relatively) unskewed, for a clear cross-section of the cells
I am fond of isometric projections because they remind me of some of the videogames I grew up with, such as “The Sims”. If I draw a cube in the isometric projection each face appears equal in size, since the three axes (x, y and z) are spaced evenly:
In the dimetric projection, two of the visible faces are the same area. In the trimetric projection none are
This makes the isometric projection a great choice when the proportions within an image matter, such as in our diagram of Chernobyl’s fourth reactor (first below) or for the size of flats in Hong Kong (second below). We considered a top-down view for the latter since the floor area was central to the story. However, a flat diagram—as well as being less fun—would make it harder to show the doors and windows (of which there are depressingly few per inhabitant).
With an isometric projection, the front of the power plant is no larger than the back
An isometric projection makes it easy to tweak the layout
Because everything is in proportion I can move one of the “coffin” homes in the diagram above and nothing needs to change size. There is no horizon or vanishing point where objects shrink to nothing. I could keep adding more and more rows of coffin homes, endlessly extending the scene. This is handy for video games, or really tall diagrams.
An example of different perspective projections
The perspective projection makes closer objects appear larger. Perspective is great for naturalistic scenes, since this is how we naturally perceive the world. It is easy to give elements emphasis; simply move them to the foreground.
The man on his phone is probably one of the first things you spot, even before we zoom in
If we want to portray movement we need a video or a 3D model, since objects need to change appearance as they travel through the scene (or the whole scene needs to change as the “camera” moves through it). Tools such as Blender and three.js make the perspective projection easy: simply switch the “camera” from orthographic to perspective:
Two very different views of thesame area
Most of our graphics are two-dimensional. For the diagram about geothermal power below, we felt that a simpler treatment kept the focus on the story we were trying to tell—the difference between the technologies. A flat design is often the best choice for a diagram with a scale.
A two-dimensional approach worked best
I also prefer a 2D design for diagrams with lots of labels. Adding too much flat text can spoil the illusion. When projected (below), the text looks as though it is part of the illustration, but it also makes it harder to read.
Of course you can project the text —but that doesn’t mean you should
The trouble with two dimensions is that they give us a limited view. How do we know that a square is a cube if we only see one side of it? Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that, while the geothermal diagram as a whole is 2D, some of the elements in the scene aren’t. Similarly if the schematic below was truly 2D the edges of the spacecraft and its booster rocket would be straight.
Adding a slight tilt gives us a better understanding of the shape
When picking a graphical projection, we usually choose between a handful compared with dozens of map projections. But hand-drawn illustrations are tricky to tweak if we change our minds later. So before sketching the diagram, it is best to consider each and every angle.
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