As many of you know, we at Online Schools are passionate about education.

To this end, we’ve fallen in love with infographics as a means for effective communication. Our flavor has always been a bit different than most as we mix in one part data with another part narrative to produce highly informative images. We’ve been able to spread these graphics to millions on the internet, and have learned a ton along the way about how to be effective. Recently though, we’ve had an inkling to take things to the ‘next level’ for our audience.

The "Data Viz Challenge", created by Eyebeam and Google, with data provided by What We Pay For, excited us as an opportunity to change things up and add a few more portions of data to the mix. At the same time, we decided, to do this right, we would introduce both the use of live data via the API and html5 and javascript for interactivity and animation.

We wanted to create a visualization that would blend storytelling and exploration and give users the opportunity to better understand the US federal budget using familiar visual metaphors. The further we dove in, the greater our excitement grew.

We wish we had countless more hours to refine the details, push forward more narrative, and do oh so much more, but this is where we’ve landed and we’re quite proud of it. (We also promise its a precursor to much more to come now that we’ve whet our appetite for these new form visualizations, especially after our redesigned site launches!)

We begin by offering you a chance to select your profile and priorities from which we show you just how they line up with the actual spending. From there we attempt to provide you with a seamless experience as you navigate through the different representations, data, and timelines – giving you a view of the data both globally, and as it applies to you.

Take a look at the video below to see the visualization in action or, if you’re anything like us, go ahead and jump in yourself .