Insight

ICYMI – Weekly round up of inspiring visual content Vol. 30

Missing your data-led visual content fix? Fear not, we got you. From a data driven blog from the ONS  to an exciting micro content pack from SumAll on when not to post on social media, the team at infogr8 have curated the most inspiring and interesting visual content we have stumbled on this week.

10 pop culture influences on baby names: Game of Thrones, Marvel, Frozen and more

Office for National Statistics

Data blog

Amelia has been the most popular name of choice for newly born girls since 2011, while Oliver has been in top spot since 2013 for boys. But with a little help from Game of Thrones, it looks as if names such as Tyrion, Theon, Sandor are gaining in popularity. OK, so they aren’t going to be challenging the pole sitters for quite some time, however this the Office for National Statistics recently revealed how naming choices are being swayed by cultural influences. One name which has seen a huge growth in popularity over the course of several X-Men movies is Logan, with the number of babies blessed with this name increasing more than ten-fold between the the 2000 film, and The Wolverine movie in 2013. With Star Wars set to rock our world later this year, we wonder if Luke, Leia and Han will shortly be surging up the charts.

Why Pinellas County is the worst place in Florida to be black and go to public school 

Tampa Bay Times

Scrolling Story

It’s unfortunate that many young people around the world in developing countries are not given the opportunity to learn from a proper education, however it’s also disheartening when we hear that some regions in developed countries are also guilty of not providing children with the skills and knowledge they need. The Tampa Bay Times has created a scrollable story to highlight why Pinellas County in Florida has an exceptionally high rate of children failing basic exams in maths and reading. We found the vertical timeline particularly intriguing, showing how different areas have become more segregated over the last decade, and it’s clear in the scatterplots which follow that it’s schools with a high percentage of black children that are failing the most. With the facts now out in the open, we hope action will be taken to offer children an education which everyone deserves and expects.

The European Court of Human Rights Uncovered: What it does, who it protects, why it matters

RightsInfo

Infographic

Established in 1959 and based in Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights is an international court which rules on cases where it is claimed the European Convention on Human Rights have been ignored in their original trials. To show us which countries bring the most cases, and who are the most and least successful in winning these, IIB Studio has created an infographic for RightsInfo highlighting these and many more interesting stats. We found it interesting that it’s the longstanding members of the court that lose the least cases that go to a full judgment, with the UK only loosing 1 out of 100 cases. Take a look, and judge for yourself.

Quick quiz: Would you make a good entrepreneur?

BBC

Quiz

It takes a very special type of person to become an entrepreneur, so if you have ever considered giving up your day job to launch your own business, the BBC has just the thing to test and see if you are made of the right stuff. This quiz will ask about your attitude to taking risks in life, how effective you are at delegating responsibilities, and how you would respond if you were offered a lot of money for your business. Our responses are used to generate personalised advice, and links to further information on setting up your own business are provided for those who are really taking things seriously. Take a go yourself, and see if you could be the next Richard Branson or Alan Sugar.

PowerDry

Whirlpool

2D Animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lATjt8vRmhU

Whirlpool South Africa wants to highlight their new PowerDry dishwashers which achieve ultimate drying results, even on plastic items, thanks to its innovative 3D airflow drying system. In order to persuade current consumers who hand wash their dishes that a dishwasher is much more advantageous by highlighting some of its more impressive features. They have created a set of animated videos, one highlighting the energy efficiency of the machine, it can save 10,000 litres of water compared to hand washing, and the other proclaiming how hygienic the Whirlpool dishwasher is.
This is great example of a brand using insight to explain the benefits of their product and help spread the information by using a friendly art-direction that appeals to a wide target audience.

Post Smart: When Not to Post on Social Media

SumAll

Micro content pack

In this day and age there is no more effective way of communicating your message with others than Social Media sites, and especially for brands this give a unique opportunity to spark up conversations with their consumers about their products of services. Social media managers at brands spend vast amounts of time crafting their posts, ensuring their message, images and has tags are optimised to garner the greatest response possible within their networks and beyond. But if you don’t get your timing right all the effort can go down the drain as your message falls on deaf ears, when to post is just as important as what you post. Helpfully SumAll have conducted a study of when the most receptive times to post content across several popular social networks. Taking the information they gathered they have created two fun micro content pieces outlining firstly the times of the day with the highest traffic across the social networks and secondly the times the have deemed posting dead zones where content has little to no chance of being noticed. Creating a handy reference point for anyone that wants to give their message the best chance of success.

Ashley Madison hack: Top 25 cities with the most profiles

Mirror

Data Stories

We all heard about the hacking of Ashley Madison, the ‘dating’ website which accommodates married people who want to cheat on their partner. Now while we have no comment on the morality of the website or the hack itself, there has been some interesting snippets of information emerging which have been extracted from the data from its home on the ‘dark web’. For instance in a article on the Mirror this week they have shown a graph of the 25 cities with the most number of accounts on cheating website. London comes in 9th as the only UK city on the list with 179,129 profiles, where as San Paulo tops the chart with a whopping 374,542 profiles with New York following behind with 268,171. Yikes!

How to Analyse Data: 6 Useful Ways To Use Colour In Graphs

Plotly
Infographic guidelines

When communicating information visually one of the main things that we use to help separate and enhance what is being shown on the page is by colour. Colour theory has something that has been used in the design world since the beginning to help further communicate a a message and colours have personalities all on to themselves, what do we mean by this? Well if you look at brands like Paypal, barclays and LinkedIn you will see they use blue to great effect as seen as trustworthy colour, where as brands who are looking for a little luxury may use purple as it is indulgent and rich like Cadbury. In a great blog post by Plotly they outline 6 useful ways to use colour theory when it comes to graphs and communicating information. In the post, they outline colour theory as one method, as well as 5 other things to consider when adding colour to your graph such as considering hue, saturation and tone, and the use of semantic colour associations to better connect with an audience. Go have a read, this post is a must for anyone looking to develop their visualisation techniques and ensure that the information they are communicating is easy to digest and remember.

We’ll be sharing more inspiration next Friday, for now you can follow the team on Twitter @infogr8. Please tweet & share your viz spotting stories to be considered for our future rounds ups. #vizspotting #ddj.

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