Randy Krum's Blog, page 3

The History of Barbie

The History of Barbie infographic from the design team at Lemonly does a great job bringing you up to date on Barbie’s history to help you enjoy the new blockbuster movie even more.

From Lemonly:

You know her. You love her. But how well do you know the history of Barbie? Barbie’s many evolutions have taken her to the runway, the White House, and everywhere in between. For more than 60 years, Barbie has held a special place in the hearts and imaginations of children everywhere — and done it all in pink high heels.

To celebrate Barbie’s iconic legacy and the premiere of Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, we created this infographic to help Barbie fans everywhere learn more about the history of one of the world’s most iconic dolls.

Check out the illustrated timeline of Barbie history below!

This design has more text than I normally like, but it works in this context, explaining each event with only 1-2 sentences. As a timeline, I’m not a fan of the weaving back-and-forth line style that doesn’t spread out the events based on time durations.

You also notice that all of the illustrations are new. They didn’t use any actual product images, movie images or even the official Barbie font to stay clear of any potential copyright or trademark issues.

Listen (and Watch) to Real-Time Wikipedia Edits

Listen to Wikipedia is a fun visual & audio project that gives life to real-time edits on Wikipedia.

For the visualization, green circles are anonymous edits, purple circles are bots, and white circles are edits by registered users. The size of the circles represent the size (in bytes) of the edit made.

Fro the audio portion, bells are additions and string plucks are subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.

Listen to Wikipedia was written by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, and is open-source. [Github link] This project was built using D3 and HowlerJS. You can read more about their project in their blog post.

A Great Chart: How Much Hotter This June Has Been

I really like this chart! It hits all of the data visualization design best practices for me. This was published by the NYTimes in the article: Here’s How Much Hotter Than Normal This June Has Been

Here’s what I like:

It’s time series data, so it’s visualized as a line chart

Year-over-year data is easy to compare as overlapping lines for the same Jan-Dec time period

No chart legend! The lines are labeled directly within your field of view in the chart

Using the pre attentive attribute of color, 2023 is highlighted in orange and the rest are gray lines

The chosen orange color isn’t red or green so there isn’t any implication of good or bad

The 2022 line is a darker shade of gray, so it’s also distinguishable, but not the focus

The x-axis labels are only every other month to minimize the text on the page

The is one example of when a non-zero baseline is appropriate so you can see the details

NOTE: This NYTimes article is behind their paywall, so you may not be able to see the original article without a subscription. I have a limited amount of “gift articles” I can share. You can CLICK THIS LINK if you don’t have a subscription and want to see the full article. It will let you see the article until I run out of shares!

27+ (Secrets) on How To Create An Awesome Viral Infographic in 2023

So you want to make an awesome infographic, but you aren’t sure where to start. Capsicum Mediaworks has 27 (Secrets) on How To Create An Awesome Viral Infographic in 2023.

This is definitely and example of “Do what I say, not what I do”.

There’s some fantastic information here! Ironically, this is NOT a great infographic. Saving a bunch of text as a JPG file does not make a good infographic. This infographic design goes against some of their own best advice! More visuals, less text. Make it big, not gigantic. Highlight/focus on the important points.

We all know that beautiful infographics are much more interesting as compared to long, plain text. It is the basic human tendency to associate more with anything that explains the same point with more visual appeal and less jargon.

Which is why infographics have become such a big deal.

The pictorial representation of the data, colorful backgrounds, short, to-the-point text, and easy to understand themes, are just some of the reasons why infographics have surpassed other digital marketing strategies in terms of popularity. And they are definitely here to stay.

So if you haven't jumped on this bandwagon yet, it's high time you do!

Found on Capsicum Mediaworks.

Visualizing Sick Days

Zach Rottman dealt with the stress of his son bringing home “bugs” from daycare by creating a table on how often the individuals of the household were sick. There are a bunch of advantages you can get from tracking “quantified self” data with visualizations, and I can appreciate this one about kids bringing home sickness from school. Not the kind of homework parents want to be dealing with.

My boy started school, my boy got sick.

As any parent could have told me, we got clobbered. Within three days, my son had Covid, and while he was only mildly sick for a day or two, he (and I) stayed home for ten. Meanwhile, my partner was out of commission for longer than that. Scarcely a week after his return our son brought home some gnarly cold—home again, not sleeping, not eating. Turns out, it’s especially hard to manage a head cold when you don’t know how to blow your nose yet and have a strong and very vocal preference against medicine. The next time it was hand, foot, and mouth disease, then RSV, followed by a slew of mysterious rashes. You get the idea. Most of the time mommy and daddy didn’t fare much better.

So, to distract me from my misery and take on a project that could plausibly be brought to fruition while also tending to a sick one-year-old, I started quantifying the sick days and built a simple web app (myboyissick.com) to see it all.

I do think the rows of 12 squares aren’t easily translatable to days or weeks on the calendar. Not a big deal when you’re designing just for yourself, but I would layout the grid to be more relatable to a calendar format.

Article found on Nightingale.

How climate change will affect generations

The IPCC released the AR6 Synthesis Report, Climate Change 2023. Featured above is a key graphic from the report uses the color-band visualization method of temperature variance each year, and then adds a new twist with five possible futures stacked within the space of the band. The timeline below the color-bands also shows the impact to people born in different age generations.

The Washington Post did a recent coverage of the report:

The report released Monday emphasizes that overall, the degree of warmth — and the subsequent health of the environment, wildlife and ourselves — can still be altered depending on policies and actions taken today. The current implemented policies would put global temperatures around 3.2 degrees of warming by 2100 — somewhere in the range of the “intermediate” or “high” pathway of future emissions scenarios depicted in the graphic, said NASA climate scientist Alex Ruane, who is a member of the core writing team for the synthesis report and helped with the overall concept and science content of the figure.

Found on The Washington Post

Electrifying Rhythms in Plant Cells

A beautiful example of an infographic being used in the scientific community. Electrifying Rhythms in Plant Cells is a scientific paper published by Daniel Damineli, Maria Teresa Portes, and Jose Feijo. The figure was created by Joana Carvalho.

Plant cells generate rhythms/oscillations in virtually all scales of spatiotemporal organization. A whopping 24 orders of magnitude in time 15 in space!

You can read the conversation about the piece on Twitter: Daniel Damineli

12 Running Shoe Lacing Techniques

Finding the right running shoe for your feet is important, but lacing your running shoe properly could turn the right shoe into the perfect shoe. Gear Junkie introduces 12 Running Shoe Lacing Techniques as a simple but informative “how to” infographic.

Both Beckstead and Paris agreed that runners should absolutely play around with their lacing technique — just not on race day.

“Try out lacing one shoe laced one way, and another way with the other — for example, one ‘high arch’ and one ‘wide,'” Beckstead said. “Experience and experimentation will help.”

And if you’re uncertain which option(s) you should try, both experts point to the surest way to find out

“Wherever there’s pain,” Paris said, “focus there first.”

Read the descriptions under each variation and see if any remedies fit your ailment (and feet).

Great use of a visual explanation design to provide valuable, useful information to their audience.

See the full article here: How to Lace Running Shoes the Right Way: 12 Variations to Fit Your Foot | GearJunkie

Climate in the United States

Climate in the United States in a new interactive dataviz tool to visualize temperature and precipitation differences from “average” by location, population, and demographics. The featured map above shows where in the US are temperatures hitting monthly extremes in December 2021, followed by 2010 and 2000 for comparison.

It’s being updated with new data all the time, but it’s not a real-time tool/ The most current data available is roughly 3-4 months ago.

Below features the precipitation extremes for the US in December 2021, 2010, and 2000.

The nation has experienced a wide variety of extreme weather over the last 125 years. But what’s extreme in one locale is obviously not always extreme in another, and what seemed extreme decades ago might now be commonplace. So, for everyone who’s ever wondered, “Is this weather normal?” USAFacts created the Climate in the United States experience.

What can you do with this new tool? Use it to track monthly average temperatures on a local level. Check total precipitation where you live and around the country to see where it’s getting wetter or drier. Compare 20th-century averages against unexpected weather events for a fuller idea of what’s “normal.”

Visit USA FACTS to interact with the data fully and view the same data based off of population and demographics.

Data Visualization Word Search

Take a break and solve this Data Visualization Types Word Search! Post your completed puzzle time in the comments!

You can play the interactive puzzle below, print it out, or play full screen.