Insight

ICYMI – Weekly roundup of best bits Vol. 6

ICYMI here’s 8 of the most inspiring visual data pieces we’ve been coming across this week, from Chipotle’s burrito data and a brand new Data Design book our lead designer Ben Willers is featured among a myriad of data & design titans..

Oscar Dresses

Big Group

As the 87th academy awards are coming up this Sunday, we couldn’t be more excited! Every year, besides the usual ceremony highlights (we are talking to you Ellen DeGeneres) there is a lot of buzz generated from the Red Carpet. Passion for fashion? This Oscar Dresses interactive from Big Group will certainly hit the hot spot. Consisting of 60 years of dresses data, you can have a little play filtering items and spotting trend patterns that disrupted the fashion industry for the past six decades.

Burrito Data

TheUpshot

We hate to break this to you if you are reading with your next trip to Chipotle in mind, but this burrito data could cause you to think twice, especially if you are watching your waistline. These histograms from The New York Times reveal that the majority of meals contain over 50% of the recommended daily calorie intake for an adult, and almost a full day’s worth of sodium. Sadly, we suspect other chain restaurants would fare just as badly if similar charts were created for those, although perhaps this would make us all think differently about where we choose to dine in future.

Name That Beep

Fusion

I remember covering my first ever modem with a pillow, trying to minimise the annoying sound it made so my dad wouldn’t catch me spending all night mIRC-ing 🙂 The good old days of emerging tech.

This charming little sound quiz by Fusion is a great example of connecting audio with visual with nostalgia to take you back decades where technology was recognised by the sound it made. You are taken on a journey of various beeps to guess the piece of technology it comes from, the final stage gets surprisingly tough so sharpen those ears, how many did you guess?

New Challenges for Data Design

David Bihanic

The infogr8 team were extremely excited this week to receive a copy of New Challenges for Data Design, a new book from David Bihanic featuring interviews and written contributions from all our favourite designers and practitioners including Moritz Stefaner, Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec and Nicholas Felton.The star-studded list is too extensive to feature here, but the Springer website features details of the full lineup. Among these is our lead designer Ben Willers who discusses how he began working with data, and the approach he takes with his work. It’s going to take us a while to work our way through all 464 pages, but when we do we’ll cover this in detail in the next trend report featuring some of the practitioners latest musings.

WikiGalaxy

Owen Cornec

With almost half a billion unique visitors every month, it’s difficult to imagine how we survived before Wikipedia (Serious journalists sigh). Sometimes we simply like to hop between random articles to see what tidbits of information we can pickup along the way. WikiGalaxy by Owen Cornec makes the journey even more enjoyable as we soar through 100,000 of 2014’s most popular articles clumped into 500 nebulas. We can see David McCandless being a fan of this one in his quest to fully realise the connections between data, knowledge and potentially wisdom. Each is visualised as a single star, and we can either fly along a predetermined path or space hop to our heart’s content. The quest for knowledge has never been more enjoyable, for anyone who loves diving into data you’ll find this pretty epic!

Mortality Causes

Alberto Lucas López

Death comes to us all, but at least now we can anticipate with greater certainty how we are most statistically likely to kick the bucket. This is thanks to Alberto Lucas López who has created an infographic displaying the main causes of death in the twenty richest and poorest countries around the world. Lung cancer is a major cause in richer countries, while those living in poorer areas are more at risk of HIV/AIDS. We would love to see this idea developed into an interactive to really bring it to life.

One way to Mars 

The Washington Post

No one here at the infogr8 team is old enough to remember the last time a man set foot on the moon, but we really hope we live to see the day when humans start exploring the surface of the red planet. The not-for-profit organisation Mars One, envisions that humans will begin to colonise the Martian landscape starting in 2025, an ambitious target perhaps, but one that has us quite excited, especially after viewing this handcrafted blueprint themed timeline from The Washington Post, outlining the key moment throughout the project. They appear to have thought of everything, apart from the small detail of how they are going to return to Earth, if every they choose to do so.

Travel Master Quiz Map

Mapbox

Maps don’t have to be boring. They can also be a great educational tool where we can add layers to enrich. We’ve seen quite a shift in interactive maps recently, Airbnb’s quirky checkins we highlighted last month being an example. This cute quiz from Mapbox is another map showing how we can exhibit and entertain an audience via visual means. The quiz asks 15 questions about famous landmarks around the globe and then takes you to the landmark when you answer it. Our only suggestions would be to tweak the map zoom whilst it can be erratic moving from map to next question, the quiz copywriting could also be a little clearer on some questions whilst we found some words to be a little ambiguous, great for the QI elves out there though 🙂