PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) published an infographic in their customer magazine, which was made by Golden Section Graphics. For this, I programmed two small applications: one converted a world map into a differently projected one (Fuller Projection). The other one generated te surrounding triangles for any countries of the world and the included bar charts. The represented values are specific indexes for the nation’s sustainability.

First, the whole thing is a poster. But one should really cut the world map out and glue the edges together, because you get a very nice paper globe! Read more on the fibonacciLAB website.

This interactive infographic delivers answers to questions such as: What is my blood alcohol concentration when I have drunk a beer? Can I still drive after having two cocktails? What fines would I have to pay if I get caught driving drunk (german version)? How does the alcohol influence my mood and my body (english version)?

This infographic won bronze in the category online at the Malofiej18 infographics award. Read more about it on the website of the spanish chapter of the Society for Newsdesign (SNDE).

Two and a half months after I started working for Golden Section Graphics in Berlin, we opened the doors to our fibonacciLAB. Here, we experiment with new technologies to design new ways of visualizing data. Read more about our intentions on our website!

On December 30, 2009, the German daily economy newspaper »Handelsblatt« published five unusual looking infographics made by Jan Schwochow (head of Golden Section Graphics) and me. Since it was the end of the year, the graphics were about numbers of last year’s/decade’s finances and some outlooks on this year/decade. Also, the title page featured a mashup of those single graphics.

The people at »Handelsblatt« had quite some chutzpah letting us go nuts with the mostly quite small data sets and the disproportionately generous space!

Read more about it on Golden Section Graphics Blog (in German).

Comparing numerical values by illustrating them as shapes, especially circles, needs to be done with the area in mind, not only a one-dimensional value that defines this shape. A circle is drawn with a radius, so another circle depicting a multiple of the value the first one is representing may not only have this multiple radius. It should have the corresponding area.

Another more extreme example showing how a circle with 25 times the radius can’t be a symbol for 25 times the size:

Found here.

Roland Loesslein (weaintplastic.com) created another interactive information graphic. It is called »The Human’s Development« and focuses on three aspects of it: health, education and living standard. On a world map and a ranking graph, nearly all nations of the world can be compared to each other. It uses data from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and visualizes trends over the past few years. Plus, the user can take action by joining a GlobalGiving project to help people in less developed countries.

Just like »synoptic«, this application was created during a class about infographics by Prof. Michael Stoll at the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, Germany.

CDN: What inspired you?

Roland: I noticed there’s information out there I think it’s important everybody understands. It’s also crucial that the way it’s being communicated is understandable for lay people, too. This induced me to watch out for such data that — as I suspected — is only available in the form of tables and rather difficult to be caught up in its entirety. This was a call to wrap it up in a new notation that even those can use and understand who don’t usually deal with the details of this subject. Also, I was motivated by the fact that everybody is currently talking about the global financial crisis, but there is another global crisis going on for much longer now and probably will last forever if we don’t do something about it.

What were your research steps? Where did you get your data from?

In the beginning it wasn’t even clear to me that it was going to be about the human development. I watched out for data that that could be mapped onto a globe, something where information is available for all countries of the world. I found quite a lot of data focussing on environmental or financial issues that hasn’t been converted into an easy to understand representation yet. The one I used is about the human development and includes many aspects like health and education but also details about environment and finances, covering many interesting facts. The second step was to filter this found research results for what to visualize. I chose the information gathered from the UNDP and GlobalGiving.

The data you got from them was not formatted the way you could use it directly, I suppose?

That’s right, probably because the UNDP has more meaningful things to do than caring about processing and sending information to a student for free, I understand that. So I downloaded some annual reports and squeezed out the necessary raw data by writing my own parser for the tables and tweaking it manually afterwards. The people at GlobalGiving were totally amazed by my idea from the first approach on. Cooperation with them was a bit easier because not only they granted me access to their API, they also invited me to join their research group where I can use the project managing tool and do some brainstorming in the disussion forums. The API is usually for their own purposes only and kind of “private beta”, which is why it was still a bit hard to get lots of information out of it. In the end, merely the “take action” link and the number of projects are delivered by GlobalGiving, the rest is by UNDP.

Is GlobalGiving already registering more clicks coming from your app?

My application tracks itself how many clicks the „take action“ logo gets. But I can’t tell whether there are more people participating in their projects or more donations since it’s online. It’s a question of trust when you send money somewhere when you don’t know where it will arrive. But being too sceptical is old fashioned thinking. GlobalGiving has a very good concept regarding the way of constantly tracking where your money flows. You can choose exactly where it should go and get detailed feedback. I guess it’s only a question of time — even I would have to think a few days about it before donating.

Why build yet another tool for visualizing such data when there are already other ones like Gapminder World or CIA’s World Factbook?

Sure, Gapminder World visualizes similar facts and figures, but I see it more as a research and analysis tool for people who work with the data. I want to access a different target audience: the layman. The CIA World Factbook has basically the same problem when it comes to adressing people who don’t want to know every single detail. It’s more like a library that provides so many information so you have to spend very much time to get an comparing overwiev on one aspect. My application has this small newsticker-like notification field which gives the user some hard facts about the chosen country, each in one single sentence. This way, some rather surprising proportions between given numbers are formulated that otherwise are hardly visible, in tables for example.

What tools, programming languages and libraries did you use?

Adobe Flash, AS3, pureMVC, Tweener, Away3D, a database with AMFPHP connection.

How’s the feedback until now?

I get lots of mails, also it’s nice to see how it’s being pushed on blogs and Twitter. I get lots more traffic than with my last project »synoptic« and the average visiting time is very high.

You should follow weaintplastic and colorfuldata on Twitter.

Two weeks ago, the German weekly Newspaper »Die ZEIT« started a series of featured Infographics on three current topics.

The first one by Golden Section Graphics in Berlin (website here, blog here) is about virtual water. It explains the amounts of water used to produce things like beer, milk, cheese, jeans and a car by depicting cubes of water with the corresponding volume. This way, the reader gets a very good idea of how many liters of fresh water he actually comsumes by buying or using one of these products. Also, the graphic briefly explains how these amounts are being calculated as well as how much water there is on our planet and how it splits up into groundwater, atmospherical water etc. The daily consuption of one person per day and its parts for hygiene, doing the laundry and watering (among others) is revealed in a simple pie chart.

The first person on the moon 40 years ago is the occasion for the second graphic, and it has one big map of the moon with all sites where past missions, manned and unmanned, succeded or… well, crashed. A neat timeline on the left tells a story about the race to earth’s oldest satellite at the end of the 1960s between the United States and Russia. For many years, there were virtually no efforts for further explorations — the lunar surface was better charted than the earthly seabed. One possible future mission led by the US and planned for not later than 2020 is explained by highlighting a good location for a manned permanent moon station at the south pole. This is an in-house graphic by ZEIT.

The third graphic, published today, is about the evolution of the bicycle. In this case, the start of the Tour de France in two days is the occasion. A spiral timeline carries 11 detailed models and explains the inventions that made the bikes of today secure, comfortable and fast. The oldest one is from 1817 and it had no pedals, no brakes and was etirely out of wood. A second timeline explains other inventions with small illustrations, for example the penny farthing, the chain drive, rubber tires and aluminium frames. This graphic was also made by Golden Section Graphics (see No. 1).

The work »random walk« by Daniel A. Becker is a collection of several printed information graphics about randomness, a phenomenon that is difficult to explain.
It proves that Daniel took a really deep dive into the matter, considering how detailed his research resuls are displayed in his graphics and explained in the accompanied text. He approaches aspects like (pseudo) random number generators, the lottery and radioactive decay of atoms. The subject pervades the entire work, even each of his 14 double-sided A2 posters has a different layout.
All illustrations are not only drawn arbitrarily, they are simulated and plotted with the help of processing.