With news of $billion-dollar tax evasions joining $billion-dollar bailouts and $trillion dollar deficits in the mind-boggled group mind, we thought it might be a good time to update the Billion Dollar-o-Gram.

This time, rather than pain-stakingly hand-drawing our treemap visualisation, we developed some generative, interactive code to render the data.

The result, we think, is both beautiful and sickening.

VizSweet

This ‘TreeMappa’ code is part of our forthcoming VizSweet software – a set of high-end dataviz tools for journalists, presenters and analysts. Find out more.

You’ll be seeing more VizSweet over the next few months. It helps us quickly render beautiful datavizzes from any kind of data, so we’ll be using it a lot.

(Although part of me snarls when I see our algorithm taking 3 milliseconds to draw what used to take me 3 days to hand-draw!)

For nostalgia’s sake, we’ve rendered the old ‘classic’ Billion Dollar-o-Gram in VizSweet-o-vision. Oh and we’ve hidden a little easter-egg in the data-viz. See if you can find it!