*news from my day-job*
I've been working with BERG to create this fantastic prototype.
The working title is called Dimensions. It helps people understand historical/ global events by juxtaposing them on their current location.
They've blogged more detail here.
Heres a post on the BBC site explaining my part more.
Lots of good reaction including Guardian, Wired and Twitter.
Late night post - so ill be brief -
There is tonnes of data generated by sport
Sports fans love data.
so - there should be more sports graphics - i found this one on wikipedia - its great - reading down you get a great feel for trends in world cup performance - not just showing the winners but those in the running each year- uruguay's demise, germany's victories every four or five cups (eek) and holland's knocking on the door, spain's total absence (maybe this is the year spanish friends?) i wont mention englands poor showing
what is obvious is that these are chartable because actual data of Placing exists - mapping the next ten places down is harder as many teams came joint 5th or 6th by not making the semis - but i reckon some better wrangling of group stage data could help
that is where we all need to get better at thinking about the data a well as what it looks like
but this is ace - well done wikipedia - i've obviously gone a bit world cup stupid but maybe i'll set this as my next student project -
I drew this the other day because I couldn't find any decent graphics that discussed Rio Ferdinand's recent injury.
(US readers - this is about the upcoming World Cup - this guy was our captain)
It's only a sketch - but it distills some information that although in the written press, needed showing visually.
- the frequency of his injuries (all through this last year) - this is the crucial matter - alot of the coverage was surprised and shocked at his injury. Even subtracting the normal WC hysteria - a blind man could see that another injury was part of a pattern. I'd show this by the clock-face-dial that showed his year and the missed games, starting in june last year, each segment would be a game that he (could have) featured in and his fitness status for that game (would be nice to show games that he played in and then compare the clean sheets too)
- the location and type of injuries also are interesting but really act as a way to draw people into the detailed data - the dial - as the two footballers do here
Maybe ill do more of these over the world cup - and if anyone wants to borrow this one, be my guest. Just make sure you cheer on England in the final.
The armored wedge My principal concern here was 'is this shape too dominant on the page?'.
The technology in focus (in this case the m18 ) is meant to be the image that readers see first - it is often on the left (where oddly in magazine design the eye should read first but may see second due to the turn of the page - or maybe people are obedient readers and don't sneak a look at the right page - but i doubt it.)
Anyway, I was worried that the 'armour wedge' not only attracted too much attention but created a compositional discord on the spread - effectively dividing a double page spread into two. Many print editorial designers say you need to fill the whole spread - I am in two minds on this.
In one way the story I tell every time is of a technology, with key features highlighted and how it fits into a bigger picture - the context of it's use, manufacture or invention.
It is my singular editorial purpose with the articles to highlight the bigger picture of WWII using the technologies as an accessible starting point. But there have also been times where at the rough stage that the weapon in question and the rest of the story haven't been so well united. This results in everything from reading difficulty (where do I start? What is this about) to general confusion (what is this about ?). It is a frequent discussion point between the excellent editorial teams and I - and I find their second pair of eyes invaluable there. (Contributors/ Creatives, what ever you do - You need a good 'editor') Or maybe I need to get better at uniting the different elements. I hope I am not jamming reluctant actors together in each if these scenes.
Other ideas
I like the idea of real life sizes on the graphic - I wouldn't want to do it every time - but there is something rewarding it the immediacy of this.
A few graphics appear on a 'landscape' vista. Have I been affected by Apple's shiny floored warehouse? Hmm - not sure - seems a nice way to set our certain ideas though.
And on the render - things are looking a little vector-arty - fades, line-art isometry, more fades - i may need to cut down on this. They are entirely appropriate to the needs of the story and data within, but there may be a Tuftian unintended consequence of this render - that of dating the work back a decade and so readers pause briefly to question it's provenance, distracting them from their primary task of understanding. (this may be a small price to pay for work that I believe seeks a timeless quality of integrity to the information and not modern fashion).
But - these are read on many levels - and the render will give signals - it's up to me to orchestrate those impressions - and one of them is an anonimity - a quality that immediately imparts the information without drawing attention to itself.
Some would say that the render needs to bring the reader in, that impartiality is sterile. I agree that if I am putting off new readers with coldness then that is an issue. I would like to think that the ideas contained within - the data, the story angle will shine through the glass of a sympathetic vessel to communicate and entice, rather than falling back on fashion, which always attracts but seldom informs and never lasts.
The Guardian factfiles are an excellent look at the state of our nation. (I could only find these large graphics online - but they were paper supplements containing pages of charts, graphics and explanations. (photos to follow if i find any)
I would have liked to be in the room when they were deciding which bits to do traditionally and which to innovate on. Most display is pretty traditional - but all supports the narrative. You can tell the ones that they wanted to have more fun with. None of them go too far - many current info-vis folks would have gone totally ape-shit with all this data - celebrating the complexity, renderring it incoherent.
These factfiles remind me of the Atlas series of books (but have a lot ore variety than thematic map presentation) and are a massive improvement on the short-lived weekly 'graphics-feature' which bordered on the 'graffix' treatment - I'm all for something attracting the eye and consolidating the information but these are a little glib.
These are original journalism.
No one else had these.
This article by Clay Shirky reminds us of the startling difference between the lost race to outpace the Internet in news everyone else covers and the valiant pursuit of originality for your audiences.
Improvements2 - I personally would have called them something a little more active and exciting than 'fact file' - fact file is a bit of a dull sounding 'sidebar'.
3. Are they a bit on their own? It is in a way easier to carve out 'space for the graphics stuff' than the integration of regular, good, daily work. Newsrooms create that tension - so this is understandable.
But these whinges are minor - this is original visual journalism with genuine ambition and lots of high points. What is surprising is that more people are not doing it. All papers have graphics people. (they don't all have a leader of Michael Robinson's calibre though).I saw this taxi the other day, with its panneling off. It allowed a view into the parts we never see. (like this fire-engine)
I think that cutaways are popular because they show people something new, starting with something they know.
This is a nice summary of my main drive over this last while
"show somebody something new, starting with something they know"
Make it accessible then make it interesting - in that order.
this post as illustrated by wordle (note the word Good highlighted - now read below)
Wordle is an automated word cloud generator. Its is good at doing this - it counts the words and displays their incidence in an obvious an visually pleasing manner. (albeit nothing new to many designers used to expressive typography). (I used it here and it worked well)
but... Journalists should look beyond Wordle when analysing election speeches and the like.
Wordle is lousy at assigning meaning. Just because someone mentions 'immigration' a lot in a speech, it doesn't mean they are necessarily for or against it. Articulating the dominant amount of a particular part of data only draws attention to it's frequency - it doesn't inform as to the reasons for the frequency. It should be noted that this is the purpose of much information visualisation - to show important parts of an unclear whole. There is nothing wrong with it but it is only the first stage of understanding something. After that, one should aspire to show more important relationships such as correlation or causation. What it and so much 'automated' visualisations lack is meaningful editting and articulation. A person thinking "what is the story or trend here and how shall I show it?" often delivers something more rewarding.
I have seen a lot of journalists munge a speech/ debate through wordle and claim some kind of revelatory articulation of hidden truths or patterns. True, Bush's post 911 speeches used the word terror a lot - of course they did - no shit, Sherlock - but that revelation is not really journalism and it certainly isn't good visual journalism. The NYT - quite a while ago now - did a comparison of different convention speeches. The comparison of many data elevates the use of these beyind the noticing of single, obvious parts of data. Wordle is not a bad thing as such - its good at one thing - but this one thing is basic. If you are a large media organsiation you may need to think a bit harder about this stuff in these times when your readers (and finance people) want more original journalism (or one could say - you have graphics teams you idiots, use them ( the new york times does, to very good effect).
