All posts from Cool Infographics

Appropriate for this week in the U.S., Labor Day by the Numbers takes an infographic look at labor statistics, top jobs in the U.S. and facts about the Labor Day holiday.  From fixr.com.
Thanks to Andreas and Thussa for the link!

From GE, this is a visual interface/tracking system of the Ecomagination Challenge: Powering The Grid.
This is a data-heavy visualization.  Each submitted idea is a dot, and the concentric rings are a timeline expanding outward from July 2010 to today.  The dot colors represent the idea categories (Create Power, Connect Power and Use Power).  The size of the dot represents how many votes each idea has received and the additional halo around a dot represents the number of comments left by others on that idea.  I can’t tell, but I hope they use the values to calculate the “area” of each dot and not it’s “diameter”!

“…our data visualization teams have put their design skills to work on GE’s new “ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid.” Backed by $200 million in venture capital funds from GE and its partners, the goal is to find the best ideas from researchers and entrepreneurs that will help accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. But it can be a daunting task plowing through the more than 1,400 submissions to-date (and growing). So, as you can see in the data visualization, the entries have been represented graphically, with the circles representing clickable ideas.”

I really like the Solar Roadways idea!
Thanks to Megan for sending the link!

 
From Spork Marketing (great company name!) comes the Colorado: The Beer Me State infographic.  Light on the “info” and heavy on the “graphic”, the use of illustrations helps provide context for each of the facts about beer in Colorado.
Personally, I would have added more data visualizations for the altitude of Denver, number of breweries, average beer consumption and how much beer production there is.  That’s just me.
Thanks for the link Jason!  You had me at “beer”…

 
The team at Flowtown.com designed the 2010 Social Networking Map as an update to the Map of Online Communities by xkcd.com in early 2007.  Social networking has certainly advanced in the last three years (even in the last three days!), so the update shows a lot of changes in geography.
It does seem a little premature to claim this is the map of social media for 2010 with five months left to go.  A lot can happen in five months (like the Apple PING service announced this week).

Crispian Jago created this great subway map of the top scientists in the last 500 years.  Subway Science plots the science celebrities by discipline (subway track), connections where appropriate and the shaded rings in the background show the timeline by century (the outer ring is the 20th century).  Sir Isaac Newton crosses 5 lines…either a great multi-tasker or ADHD.
 

You can see that Crispian has tagged this as DRAFT version 0.37, and he already has a huge number of comments on his Science, Reason and Critical Thinking blog post.  I expect there will be revised versions in the future.
Where’s Sheldon Cooper?!?
Found on Bad Astronomy and Visual Loop

Icons of the Web is a massive image that portrays icons of the top websites on the Internet.  Sizing their favicons based on the site traffic according to Alexa, they were able to get 288,945 good icon images out of the top 1,000,000 sites.

A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.
We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.
The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons—those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach—are scaled to 16x16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

 
You can use the online search engine to locate a particular site icon, and OF COURSE I had to look for the Cool Infographics icon.  Found it!
 

Programming and design was done by David Fifield and scanning performed by Brandon Enright.
Found on Social Media Graphics

From Scores.org, a data-heavy Google(graphic) by Jess Bachman, Google’s Acquisition Appetite.  Visualizing almost 10 years of Google’s acquisitions and investments, and there’s hardly a month that Google didn’t invest in something.
I like the multiple dimensions to the data.  Three columns show how the acquisition helped Google, the colors of each acquisition show what assets were gained, an additional circle shows the value of the acquisition (if it is known) and of course the timeline aspect.
Great job Jess!  I’d love to see you keep this updated somewhere.

Beware Work-At-Home Scams is a recent project I did for elearners.com to visualize how prolific work-at-home scams are, which jobs to avoid and how individuals can protect themselves.
The data is actually fairly difficult to find and very dry.  I had to read through a number of reports from the FTC, the SBA, the IC3 (I had never heard of the Internet Crime Complaint Center!) and other news reports.  Even after reading through those reports, there was very little hard data.  To create the infographic, I needed to use the figure of Orange Man as a character figure to help visualize the information.
 

 
Done in OmniGraffle, I think the topic was a perfect example of when an infographic is really useful.  Information that is incredibly difficult for consumers to find (let alone understand), so it wouldn’t normally reach the general public.
Feedback?
 

Last week, Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering ay Google, posted the Google Maps for Mobile timeline on the Google Mobile Blog as part of his post on the history of Google Maps for Mobile Devices.

I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t posted this one by David McCandless from InformationIsBeautiful.net.  Timelines: Time Travel in Popular Film and TV is one of my favorites, and you can tell how much effort went into the design and getting the details right.

Here’s a visualisation of time travel plots in various films and TV programs. I had a lot of fun doing this!
This is a straight data visualisation, rather than information design. That is, it’s not particularly useful, nor useable, nor meaningful. The inspiration was the coolness of the idea, really. I was excited to see what shape all the plots would make, and whether it could be shaped into something beautiful.
What I really love about this image, though, is the idea that this information has never been seen before. Despite the fact that it exists, in some way,somewhere, wrapped in various plots, it’s never been given form. I have to say, it was a joy to untangle it all :)

David, I would love to help design one for Dr. Who!
 

Karen Kavett is a graphic design student at the Rhode Island School of Design and she was inspired to create the So You Want To Watch YouTube flowchart after seeing the So You Need A Typeface flowchart by Julian Hansen.

I was really inspired by the So You Need a Typeface poster and figured, why not make one for which YouTube channel to watch? It was a bit of a bigger undertaking than I originally anticipated, taking about 3 days from start to finish. I began by making a list of everyone I’m subscribed to and other popular YouTubers I thought should be on it. Then I divided them into Vloggers, Musicians, and Everyone Else, and just went at making a really ugly graph showing all the different routes. I had to cut some people out since their channels were just too similar to others I had already used, so if you’re not on here please don’t feel offended. If I included everyone I wanted to it would probably be about twice as big! Finally, I designed this final piece, which luckily, everything fit perfectly into.

Nice job Karen!  I especially like the “Get out of my flowchart” endpoint!

Andy Harris from TooManyCars.info has updated (a few times) his fantastic Automotive Family Tree map of who owns the car companies since the last time I posted about it a couple years ago.  The map is so big and detailed that you have to click on specific ownership corporations to zoom into just their connections.  The colored connection lines indicate the nature of each relationship (Joint Venture, License, Ownership or Sharing Technology).

You can enter to win a FREE copy of the printed poster by tweeting a link to this post on Twitter including the hashtag “#autotree” (without the quotes) by the end of the day on August 6th.  I’ve included the hashtag in the title, so you can enter by retweeting the post from my Twitter account.  One winner will be randomly chosen to receive a printed copy of the poster.  You have to be following me on Twitter so I can send you a direct message if you win.

The large version is available for a small donation to TooManyCars.info.  The PDF is available for $10, and the 36”x36” printed poster is available for $30.
Andy also agreed to answer a few interview questions about how he makes the Automotive Family Tree and it’s history.

Cool Infographics: What inspired you to create the Automotive Family Tree?
Andy Harris: About 8-10 years ago in a British auto magazine I saw a diagram showing the main connections between automotive manufactures (Ford owns Lincoln, GM owns Chevy, etc.). The more I thought about the diagram, the more info I wanted to know. I decided I want to learn HTML so I used the idea of the Automotive Family Tree as my learning curve.   
 
Cool Infographics: Do you do all of the design yourself?  What’s your background?
Andy Harris: I do all the design for the website and Automotive Family Tree myself. My day job is telecommunications engineering, however my background is in CAD. Bottom line, I draw maps showing where the telephone cable in the alley is located, type of cable, electronics, etc. I never really consider myself a design artist.   
 
Cool Infographics: What software applications do you use for the family tree?
Andy Harris: Because of my background in CAD, the large PDF is made using AutoCAD. But the smaller diagram for the website is done in OmniGraffle. So, my MacBook Air gets a work out switching between XP to use AutoCAD and OS X to use OmniGraffle.
 
Cool Infographics: How much traffic does having the infographic drive to your site, TooManyCars.info?
Andy Harris: When I first started my website, it was about car reviews. Then I switched to blogging a few years back. But the heart of my website has always been the Automotive Family Tree. This infographic is a major reason someone comes to my blog.

Cool Infographics: Are there any interesting places you know the poster is being displayed?
Andy Harris: The most interesting printed posted I sold to was someone in Russia and Turkey. My download PDF has also been sold around the world. But the most interesting request for the Automotive Family Tree was used in a Master Thesis from a student in Poland. However, one thing I’m proud of is being published in GQ magazine from Taiwan. The automotive industry is truly international!
 
Cool Infographics: What are some of the most surprising or interesting company relationships you’ve found by doing the family tree?
Andy Harris: I think the most surprising relationship in the family tree is the amount of change. There are joint-ventures everywhere because of the economy, and more and more sharing of technology between manufactures, making some strange bed-fellows. I’d say the new Renault-Mercedes-Benz connection is the most surprising.
 
Cool Infographics: How difficult is it to gather the company relationship data?
Andy Harris: I get this question many times, how long did it take you to make this? I really don’t like to think about it, but if I had to guess, 120 + hours in just gathering information, reconfirming, gathering more information, more confirmation and still gathering more information. I’ve recreated it two times. My first example was more simple and just using the major automotive manufactures from USA, Euro and Asia. Then as China grew, I added more automotive logos, more gathering of information and reconfirming. I’m not sure if it was difficult as much as time consuming. But putting this together became a love of labor.
 
Cool Infographics: What are the printing specs for the poster and why?
Andy Harris: I currently print at 36”x36”, I started as D-size or 24”x36”. As it grew 36”x36” was the most logical choice and the square print looks nice.
 
Cool Infographics: What’s the most interesting part of designing the Automotive Family Tree?
Andy Harris: I think one of the most interesting parts about the Automotive Family Tree, is the different types of people wanting to download the PDF. I’ve got request from a F1 engineering group, NUMMI manufacture marketing (before they closed), trading companies, automotive equipment manufacturers and oil companies. But not the petrol makers, think more like lubrications for engines and lubricants for manufacturing equipment. When I started this journey, I only wanted to inform the public that the automotive world is truly international, and now I get emails asking me to add more specialty manufacturers or even make custom inforgraphics.

Great job Andy!