Randy Krum's Blog, page 53
March 24, 2014
How Google Glass Works
The Google Glass phenomenon has gotten a ton of coverage from the tech press, but how does it work? Creator Martin Missfeldt explains the inner workings in his How Google Glass Works infographic.
How does it work, Google’s new Glass? Why can you see with it a sharp image-layer? How does the image overlay the image of reality? The following infographic illustrates the optical principle - very simple and easy to understand.
Google Glass is a technical masterpiece. It combines numerous functions and features in a very small unit. In addition to phone and camera (photo, video), it offers Internet connection, including GPS.
The core feature of Google Glass is a visual layer that is placed over the reality (“augmented reality”). This layer opens a door to amazing new possibilities. But how does it work? In the Google Glass contains a mini-projector, which projected the layer via a clever, semi-transparent prism directly on the retina in the eye. Because of this the image, even though it is so close to the eye, is sharp and clear. You can move the front part of the Google Glass easily to optimize the focus.
This informative infographic is a great how-to explanation of the science and technology built into Google Glass. Illustrations and images are used in this design to tell the story instead of data visualizations.
A German version of the infographic was also published.
Found on http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/05/a-great-visual-guide-on-how-google.html
March 21, 2014
Life Expectancy at Birth
The Life Expectancy at Birth infographic by designer Marcelo Duhalde from Muscat, Oman is a fantastic data visualization of the current life expectancies by country if you were born 2013.
Average number of years to be lived by a group of people born last year (2013) if mortality at each age remains constant in the future. The entry includes total population of both male and female components.
From a design perspective, this infographic tells one story really well. The infographic focuses on communicating one set of data effectively (lifespan) without complicating the design with additional extraneous information. The overall design is very attractive, and grabs the audience’s attention with a big, central visual element. The curving bars are unusual, but have the benefit of condensing the early years so they take less space in the overall design.
At the macro level, it’s obvious there is a big difference between the various countries and continents. The readers are drawn in to compare the details of the different countries they are familiar with. Usually starting with where you live, and then looking to see which countries fare better or worse than your location. Of course the data represents a massive generalization of millions of people, but does tell a great story at that higher level.
The design looks like it’s perfectly sized to be printed as a poster, but I couldn’t find any mention of one. The sources could definitely be more specific than just listing the top level sites that data was gathered from, and the URL to the infographic landing page on Visualizing.org should have been included in the footer information.
Found on PolicyMic
March 18, 2014
The Power of ACC Basketball
The Basketball Staff at CBS Sports has put together a handful of really good data visualizations showing the 29-year history of the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded to 64 teams. The chart above shows Most Wins won in the Tournament by conference, color-coded by round. These aren’t complicated designs, but the story they tell is very powerful.
Go N.C. State Wolfpack! Fantastic win over Xavier tonight! The Big East looks pretty strong too, but there’s nothing like ACC Basketball. These data visualizations tell that story much better than text and numbers. In Texas (Big 12), they just don’t seem to understand the importance of basketball. Football is what you play in the off-season! They have it reversed here in Texas, where football is much more important.
Here is that same data shown as a color-coded table that spells out the Most Tournament Wins by Year by year. This looks like it could have been designed with Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Excel, but it’s done very well. The simple color-coding adds context and makes the entire table easier to understand.
As an infographics design, the PNG image file itself should include a little more information, in case it gets shared online without the rest of the article (like this blog post). It should list CBS Sports as the publisher/designer and the URL back to the original article. I also would have used the conference logos along the y-axis instead of text.
Here’s their chart of overall over that same 29 year period.
March 17, 2014
The State of Infographics at SxSW 2014
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I post all types of infographics and data visualizations from designers all over the world here on Cool Infographics, and as a recap, I wanted to take stock of the state of infographics and data visualization at this year’s SxSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX.
I’ve been going to SxSW for a few years now, and infographics have been a growing presence in the Interactive portion of the conference every year. You can find hidden sessions about data visualization, visual communication and infographics in different portions of the conference like the new SXsports, Health and Business sessions.
Check the links and search the presentation hashtags on Twitter to find more information and audience comments from each event. I know I didn’t catch everything, so send me links to anything (Events, notes, slides, etc) I missed through the Contact page or the comments and I’ll add appropriate ones into the post!
*Sessions I was able to attend
Official Events:
The Onions of Interactive Infographic Design (#adobesxsw)
Sarah Hunt, Product Manager, Adobe Systems @sarahwhatsup
This session covered the value of creating animated, interactive infographics with HTML your readers care about using Adobe Edge Animate.
Presentation online: http://sarahjustine.com/sneakyfolder/pres
Sports Don’t Look the Same Anymore* (#sportsviz)
John Meyer, Founder, Statographics and CEO, Lemonly @johntmeyer
Meyer examined how infographics, data visualizations, and interactive pieces have changed the landscape for scouts, managers and marketers inside of the game, as well as fans and fantasy players outside the game.
Slides available online at bit.ly/sportsviz
Truth Will Set You Free but Data Will Piss You Off* (#dataethics)
Grace Rodriguez, Founder/President, C2 Create @gracerodriguez
Jake Porway, Executive Director, DataKind @jakeporway @DataKind
Jonathan Schwabish, Government Economist, PolicyViz @jschwabish
Kim Rees, Co-Founder, Periscopic @krees @Periscopic
This session explored the issues and ethics around data visualization—a subject of recent debate in the data visualization community—and suggest how we can use data in tandem with social responsibility.
Storify notes: http://storify.com/gracerodriguez/sxsw-panel-the-truth-may-set-you-free-but-data-wil
The Most Influential Visualizations of All Time (#5vizzes)
Andy Cotgreave, Social Content Mgr, Tableau Software @acotgreave
We’ve chosen the 5 most influential visualizations of all time. Each of the charts in this list instigated change: one helped eradicate cholera, another revolutionized nursing.
Presentation slides: http://www.slideshare.net/TableauSoftware/the-most-influential-vizzes-of-all-time-sxsw
Andy’s summary blog post: http://gravyanecdote.com/uncategorized/sxsw-the-most-influential-visualisations-of-all-time/
Actively Participating in the Big Data Revolution (#DataRev)
Elissa Fink, CMO, Tableau Software @elissafink
In this talk, Elissa will share their stories and offer insights into how we can all become more data-driven, every day
HighOnData Dashboard: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/highondata
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The Tyranny of Edward Tufte* (#tuftyranny)
Gabriel Schaffzin, Researcher & Designer & Builder, Skeptic @gabischaffzin
When Edward Tufte tweets mockingly of the leaked NSA slides, he does so as the self-anointed king of presenting evidence. Empiricism’s head cheerleader, he has built an empire on telling everyone—lowly marketer to NASA bigwig—what Truth looks like. And we eat it up.
Presentation slides: http://utopia-dystopia.com/blog/2014/3/8/sxsw-interactive-2014-austin-tx
Scientist to Storyteller: How to Narrate Data (#Sci2Story)
Eric Swayne, Prod Mgr/Analytics Dir, BuzzShift @eswayne
Storify: http://storify.com/40deuce/scientist-to-storyteller-how-to-narrate-data-sci2s
Prezi presentation: https://prezi.com/xkqdi1lq8iix/scientist-to-storyteller-how-to-narrate-your-data/
Visually Turning Complexity into Clarity* (#clarity)
Fernanda Viégas, Research Scientist, Google @viegasf
Graham Roberts, Graphics/Multimedia Editor, The New York Times @Grahaphics
Karl Gude, Graphics Editor in Residence, School of Journalism at Michigan State University @karlgude
Ronnie Lipton, Info Design Author, Trainer, Consult @ronnielipton
We are a unique gathering of professional visual communicators who employ a wide variety of storytelling platforms (print, interactive and motion graphics) and visual tools (maps, graphs, diagrams, video, etc.) to do our jobs. We will explain our process for finding visual stories in the data, discuss the best technologies for doing what we do and illustrate how we build, plan and execute graphics.
Wind Maps: http://hint.fm/wind/
Sketchnotes: https://twitter.com/KKellyMSU/status/443484058043944960/photo/1
Show & Tell: How to Present, Extraordinarily (#ShowTell)
Dan Roam, President, Digital Roam Inc @dan_roam
There are 3 simple rules for making an extraordinary presentation:
Tell the truth
Tell it with a story
Tell the story with pictures
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Mentor Session: Brian Wallace (#infographs)
Brian Wallace @nowsourcing is the founder of NowSourcing, Inc., a infographic design and social media agency since 2005 serving everyone from startups to the Fortune 500 and everything in between.
Workshop: Pimp Your Pitch: Learn Visual Storytelling (#pitchfix)
Nancy Duarte, Principal, Duarte @nancyduarte
Paul Brown, VP, Duarte @Duarte
Mike Pacchione, Facilitator, Duarte @mpacc
Ryan Orcutt, Assoc Creative Dir, Duarte
This Visual Storytelling workshop will teach you how to create audience empathy, address resistance, heighten emotional appeal, and strengthen your story structure to persuade your audience.
Book Signing, Randy Krum, Cool Infographics* - that’s me! (#coolinfobook)
Randy Krum @rtkrum @Coolinfographic appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design”
Book Signing, Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise (#ESPNbrand)
Nate Silver @NateSilver538 appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t”
Book Signing, Dan Roam, Show & Tell (#ShowTell)
Dan Roam @dan_roam appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “The Back of the Napkin” and his new book launched at SxSW this year “Show & Tell!”
Book Signing, Nancy Duarte, Resonate* (#pitchfix)
Nancy Duarte @nancyduarte appeared at the SX Bookstore to sign copies of “Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences”.
The SxSW Trade Show Floor
I found three trade show booths this year related to infographics:
Tableau Software booth
Visual.ly booth*
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Now Sourcing booth*
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Graphic Recordings of SxSW Interactive Events
ImageThink created a bunch of LIVE graphic recordings from prominent sessions and made them available for everyone to see across from Ballroom A in the Austin Convention Center and online. I hope they eventually post high-resolution versions on their own site after SxSW.
http://sxsw.com/interactive/news/2014/graphic-recordings-2014-sxsw-interactive-content-march-15-update
Unofficial Sessions:
The Attention Economy with Walter, book signing by Ekaterina Walter @Ekaterina, co-author of The Power of Visual Storytelling
“Attention is the new commodity. Visual storytelling is the new currency,” say co-authors Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio in their new book The Power of Visual Storytelling. The first 100 attendees for Ekaterina’s signing will get a copy of her book. Come chat with Ekaterina about the visualization revolution and her thoughts about SxSW Interactive 2014.
Hosted by Vocus @Vocus
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/wtf-sxsw-visualize-a-powerful-future-tickets-10822280733
FH Black Box lounge at the Four Seasons (#FHBlackBox)
Fleishman Hillard @Fleishman hosted the Black Box Lounge throughout SxSW Interactive with a massive Social Media Control Center that was visualizing millions of data points and mentions online about SxSW.
http://fleishmanhillard.com/
Column Five announced the release of Visage
Column Five @columnfive announced their new interactive data visualization tool, Visage at SxSW.
“Visage is a new Web-based platform that transforms the uninspired data in your reports into beautiful, branded visualizations that make your message more impactful—and make your work look good. The easy-to-use software helps you create high-quality, professional visualizations that are accurate, effective and elegant.”
http://www.columnfivemedia.com/blog/introducing-visage-our-new-visualization-platform
Cool Infographics Meetup
Special thanks to the team at the Fleishman Hillard Black Box Lounge! They allowed me to host the Cool Infographics @Coolinfographic meetup event after my book signing on Monday for anyone that wanted to hang out. It was also an opportunity to meet fans and sign books for people that didn’t have official SxSW badges.
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Please help add anything I missed by posting in the comments below or sending me a note through the Contact page. I’ll add new content into the post above.
March 13, 2014
How Will You Make Your 2014 Numbers?
A good B2B infographic design, How Will You Make Your 2014 Numbers from Zilliant gives you 3 options to leverage when setting prices. Good luck making your numbers!
Pricing is the most powerful lever a company has to boost profitability, yet it is often the last bastion of guesswork in many companies.
When it comes to setting prices, what we typically see is that B2B companies take one of three distinct approaches: opinion and experience, backward-looking analytics and predictive modeling.
Where does your company fall? Take a peek at this infographic and find out!
I’m definitely seeing a big increase in design requests for B2B infographics that can be used in presentations, brochures and handouts. This design is a great example of showing how their service outperforms the alternatives. The design was sized to fit on standard size paper, so anyone can print it out. The racetrack path also walks the audience through the information in a very specific sequence.
Thanks to Danielle for sending in the link!
March 5, 2014
Hungry Tech Giants
Hungry Tech Giants is a cool infographic from Simply Business that is both zoomable and interactive! To put them into context, the design visualizes 15 years of tech company acquisitions by Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, And Facebook.
2013 was a busy year for tech acquisitions.
With competition in the tech space heating up, Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook collectively executed 65 acquisitions in 2013 alone.
Yahoo was the biggest acquirer of 2013, buying a total of 25 companies following the hiring of its new CEO, Marissa Meyer.
Although Meyer is best known for her acquisition of Tumblr, the majority of her deals have bought engineering talent in an effort to build Yahoo as a serious challenger to Google.
Apple also had their biggest ever year for acquisitions in 2013, with ten purchases in total.
To see all of the acquisitions in detail, please visit our interactive microsite.
Each acquisition is appropriately placed on the timeline, and shown as a circle sized to match the total acquisition price. Solid circles shown known prices, and open circles are not sized because the acquisition amount was never released publicly. The circles are also color-coded to represent the different categories.
The interactivity allows you to select which categories to show, and when you hover over any particular acquisition, the acquired company name is shown with a link to the press release or news story announcing the acquisition.
The zooming controls allow you to adjust the date range shown, which helps identify many of the overlapping circles. Clicking on the company logos on the left also brings up the data table which shows all of the known values, dates and includes the links to the press releases. A very good way to establish credibility and make your data sources transparent.
The overall design is meant to be very detailed and allow the audience to dig in and explore the data. At the macro level, the infographic clearly puts Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp into context as the largest tech acquisition of all time!
Found on TechCrunch and Cult of Mac!
February 27, 2014
The Best Pictures from the Academy Awards
The Best Pictures infographic from Beutler Ink is an iconic timeline through the history of the Academy Awards winners for Best Picture. Can you identify the movies from the icons?
Beutler Ink celebrates the 2014 Oscars with a poster commemorating each of the past 85 Best Picture winners. See how many movies you can recognize from the icon alone.
This is a fun design that draws the readers in by challenging them to identify the past winners based on the icons or illustrations shown for each film. I could only identify about half of them, so I appreciated the answers included in the footer.
The big lesson we can learn from this design, is that once an infographic image is published online, it takes on a life of its own. Infographics are usually shared online by people without any of the accompanying text that the publisher included on the original infographic landing page. Because of this, all of the relevant information needs to be included in the infographic image file itself, or it gets lost when people share it.
In this case, the audience would have no idea that the award winning pictures in this design are from the 2014 Academy Awards (popularly known as the Oscars). The landing page includes the introductory description text “Every Best Picture winner since the inception of the Academy Awards…” but there’s no introduction in the infographic design itself. There are literally hundreds of different types of Film Awards (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_awards), and the audience doesn’t know what this infographic is sharing without that introduction. It needs to be included in the the infographic itself.
There’s no information that identifies this design is relevant for 2014. Infographics are generally available online for years, and for a timeline based design, it’s important to clearly state the timeframe represented. When someone finds this design in 2016, the section for “This Year’s Nominees” won’t be accurate. Additionally, if they update this design next year, there should be a clear way to identify the version based on the timeframe shown.
Also, when readers find this infographic shared on other sites, they have no way to find the original without a URL. The URL to the original infographic landing page should be included in the footer.
Thanks to Jarred for sending in the link! Also found on Visual.ly
February 25, 2014
An Infographic Guide to Wedding Roles
The Ultimate Visual Guide to Wedding Roles from Great Speech Writing helps clarify the complicated and misunderstood traditions behind who does what in a wedding.
Thinking about proposing; recently proposed; or just worried about what planning a wedding actually involves? Big or small, at home or in a venue, it’s going to tale a lot of organising. When it comes to the wedding speeches we take the strain. But there’s also a guest list to compile, a venue to book and countless people to arrange. And in most cases, it’s something we only do once! So here is the Great Speech Writing contribution: a wedding infographic to print-off, pin on the fridge and help you focus on who does what and when. It’s not going to be easy, but at least you won’t have to worry about the speeches.
In terms of relevance, this is a great topic selection for an infographic from the publisher, Great Speech Writing. It’s related to their business, but it is also a general interest topic that will be informative to a broad audience.
The topic also has a long Online Lifespan, which is how long the infographic will remain relevant to readers and continue to generate page views and back links. Since the topic isn’t tied to any current events in the news, the infographic will be relevant for years to come.
The design is overly text-heavy, but I understand the design challenge. Each action item should probably have an associated icon or illustration like the Joint Responsibilities section. For example, a silhouette of a stripper pole dancing for the “Organise and host a memorable stag party” action item. The design of an “Ultimate Visual Guide” should be much more visual!
The footer has the URL to the main front page of the Great Speech Writing site, but that doesn’t help readers find the original full-size infographic. There isn’t a link to the infographic on the front page. So the infographic should include the URL directly to the infographic landing page, so readers can find it even when people share the infographic in social media without an active link.
Thanks to David for sending in the link!
February 24, 2014
How to Create Beautiful Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a skill that requires a lot of practice. But no amount of practice will help you if you don’t have the right tools. The How to Create Beautiful Calligraphy infographic from Moo explains everything that you need to be successful. From the tools you need, to how to actually do each letter.
The graphic is a step-by-step guide to creating your own stunning hand-drawn calligraphy, and explores everything from the tools and materials you need, to how to draw the perfect curve with your nib. The design very clearly walks the audience through the sequence of information using illustrations to enhance each point.
The text is a little bit too small when the infographic is sized to fit within a blog post (usually 600 pixels wide, as you can see above), but that can also have the benefit of encouraging readers to click through to see the original full-size version on the Moo site.
The footer of the infographic should include a copyright statement (or Creative Commons) to clearly outline the rights for sharing that the publisher wants to allow online. Also, the URL to the original infographic landing page on the Moo site would be very helpful. Currently it is very hard to find on the Moo site, and is not included in any blog posts that I could find. Including the URL in the infographic image itself ensures that readers will be able to find the orignal even when the infographic is shared in social media without a correct link back to the original.
Thanks to Dan for sending in the link!
February 21, 2014
Which Disney Park is the Happiest?
There is definitely some competition between the various Disney parks, and the Which Disney Park is the Happiest? infographic design from Cheap Flights tackles this competition head-on!
There are a handful of things that this design does right:
The design is about Disney, but isn’t endorsed or from Disney so they correctly avoided using any official logos that might cause a trademark infringement.
Most of the data is visualized, and not just shown in text! There are a few stats near the end that are just shown as text with an icon, and readers will consider these as secondary, less-important statistics.
The consistent icons for the different parks, helps the readers compare between the separate data visualizations
Proportionally sized circles are shown a few times, correctly sized by area.
Data sources and the publishing company are clearly shown in the footer.
The infographic clearly walks the reader through the relevant information, and makes a case for a specific, controversial conclusion, which invites comments and engagement from the readers.
There are a couple things I would suggest as improvements:
The double bar used for WDW Florida in the Number of Hotels bar chart mis-represents the data. I’m sure they did it to keep the overall length of the design shorter, but to give the audience an accurate understanding of how many more hotels there are in Florida, this should be shown as a single bar at the full, correct height.
The footer should include the URL to the original infographic on the Cheap Flights site. It’s actually hard to find the original because there are no links to the infographic anywhere else on the site.
Personally, I favor the Florida parks, and can’t wait to get back there soon!
Found on the Huffington Post
