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Spitfire fighter plane. WWII Magazine, Nov issue, 2009

This month's WWII Magazine graphic looks at the Spitfire fighter plane. 

The story is that despite improvements to the Battle-of-Britain-winning-plane, the thin wings that enabled its superiority also prevented it from carrying much fuel - rendering it less useful for the longer range missions as the Allies progressed into Europe.

Below are some issues that arose during its creation.

Parti

I am developing some ideas based on the architectural principle of 'parti'. 

This is the 'unifying principle' of the building. 

In graphics I see it as the unique compositional distinction - the basic idea of the graphic - as manifest in the underlying composition. 

It goes beyond the satisfying swoosh of a knapkin sketch. It is similar to affordance in interaction design - an immediate clue as to the workings of an object - although as well as this functional cue, the parti in information graphics informs the reader of the purpose and basic thrust of the facts.

It can be as simple as in a graphic about recession, a sense of 'downwards' should prevail. 

The spitfire graphic is about improvement - that is why the plane on the right is soaring up - and the shape of the whole is progressive. 

Ill be writing more about this. 

I first read it in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School -  quite a nice primer on such matters - and gold dust for me in the parti bit. 

It doesn't seem to be mentioned in other architecture books much - apart from knapkin sketches from long lunches. Matt J was a good sounding board on this - and also told me I needed a propeller ellipse (I was sticking to my guns that the prop would be invisible - but was consistently shouted down by him and others)

The See-Through-Plane

The central images are the cutaway Spitfires. 

They are not traditional cutaways - with their mechanical guts exposed in glistening detail. I have selected a few items to highlight as I wanted to show the pilot in the machine above all else.

Close-up of the pilot

I started off wanting to compare the guns, engines, other important variables in the planes but at this scale, they look fairly similar and so there was little point. 

I was very keen to show the pilot's place in the plane  - in order to show the vulnerability of those flying these machines.

These fighters were just engines with wings and guns with pilots were slotted in behind the fuel tanks.

I wanted this to show the pilots as supported aloft by these machines with not much between them and the elements.

(I was also inspired by a bit in the Freak Brothers underground comics where an accomplice of the protagonists hallucinates that he is flying in a sky filled with see-through-planes flown by naked women. 

Not many military technology information graphics blogs can say that.)

World Cup Qualifying Graphic

England are going to the Next World Cup.

That's good news for us Englishmen. It is good to have qualified early - good to avoid the stress of playoffs (always used to be against Poland it seemed).

The victory stirred my general WC2010 interest. Who were we going to play? Who would we need to beat? But also who is having the kind of trouble we used to have? Which 'fancied teams' are giving their fans a rough run-in? 

The sports-media had these kind of details in text and the odd table on view - but I felt something was missing. It turns out there are quite a few big teams that are having difficulty but no way of working out the scale of this upset - or if the 'mighty' were indeed falling.

So I thought of an idea for a graphic (the basic idea of which could fit any media). 

The Story Idea is "are big teams having difficulty qualifying for the word cup?"

To do this, the graphic would need to show two main variables in it's search for a correlation - Strength Of Team and Qualifying Status.

Here it is (sketch form only) - Big version here or click image below

The best way to show the strength of team was the Fifa rankings (true to 12.9.09) of the top 32 teams in the world - those that should be in with the best chance of qualifying.

Qualifying status was then marked with colours.

Green for Qualified

Yellow for In qualifying position - by playoffs potentially

Red for not in qualifying position

Then it got tricky. It isn't just a question of securing a qualifying position.

In UEFA countries, unless you are top of your table, you need to be in the higher-points qualifiers to get into playoffs - so even 2nd place in a table isn't a guarantee. So I was left with a quandry - Either keep the yellow for this overall place rating with the inherent complexity of each teams position shielded - of use more colours - to describe the different states.

I felt that too many colours would render all the colours less useful. So I added secondary colour marks in the yellow bars.

Green circle  • - Top of group

Red circle  • - In playoff position for CONCACAF vs SAmerica.

With hindsight, I don't think I need the red dot. I was obsessing about how amazing it is that a team like Argentina wouldn't qualify. Reading about Maradona and considering the pressure that the whole team was under made me park my better judgement - that bar should have been just yellow - they were in the qualifying place (currently a play off against El Salvador - so we'll probably be seeing them in South Africa).

South America qualifying table

Other notes -

- The right of the page would have provided a place for more detailed display of the tables and relevant data callouts - I've only got a few, thinking to just select the relevant tables/ data stories.

But maybe one should show them all - using the colours in the main chart as highlights and guiding points to the key stories in the complexity. By presenting All Tables, the reader would soon be aware of the complexity - and having read such tables before - would go about it in their own time.

- I would illustrate this page with two photos - one player (probably English) celebrating and one player probably Ronaldo) looking annoyed.

Come on England.