Top data visualizations of 2025, from Pew Research Center’s designers – Pew Research Center
Our favorite data visualizations of 2025
December 15, 2025, By Alissa Scheller
Every year, designers at Pew Research Center create hundreds of charts, maps and other data visualizations. We also help make a range of other digital products, from “scrollytelling” features to quizzes based on our research and large interactive databases.
All of these products are aimed at communicating our research findings clearly and concisely. Our graphics must have clear takeaways and engage readers. They also must be easily viewed on small screens, especially as smartphones have become so widespread.
Ultimately, our graphics should tell a story about our research, whether it’s about changing media habits or shifting social norms. Below, we’ll highlight a few of our favorite visuals from 2025 and walk through how we made them and what makes them successful.
Related: Striking findings from 2025
Showing shifts over time with alluvial diagrams
Alluvial diagrams are named after the alluvial “fans” that naturally form in sediment from streams of water. Sometimes called Sankey diagrams, they’re a unique way of showing changes over time. They allow us to show changes in the composition of various categories of data between two points in time.
In the two examples below, bars and columns represent the categories in each year, while the flows between them show changes in the composition of those categories. We could easily show this data as a simple bar or column chart, but alluvial diagrams allow us to show not only that shifts happened, but also how they happened.
The first graphic shows how the American electorate shifted between 2020 and 2024, leading to President Donald Trump’s return to the White House:
This chart uses a paneled version of an alluvial diagram to highlight different voter flows between 2020 and 2024. In both the static and interactive versions of the visualization, we walk readers through the decisions that three categories of Americans – 2020 Trump voters, 2020 Biden voters and 2020 nonvoters – made in 2024. With this type of diagram, we can show how relatively small changes drove a larger electoral shift.
Alluvial diagrams are particularly useful for survey data that comes from the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of U.S. adults who agree to take our polls regularly. With a survey panel like the ATP, we’re able to poll the same people regularly, and alluvial diagrams allow us to show how their attitudes and experiences have – or have not – changed over time.
We also used an alluvial diagram – albeit in a slightly different way – to visualize how Israeli Jewish adults have switched their affiliation within Judaism since childhood. The diagram below shows how Israeli people were raised and how they currently identify:
At the Center, we don’t use alluvial diagrams often. But when called for, they can be a powerful way of breaking down changes in various categories over time. We’ve also used them to show shifts in U.S. public opinion about China, acquittal and conviction rates in federal trials, and how the number of women’s colleges in the United States has declined over time.
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