Today we will be looking at visualising data, specifically diagrammatic data. This is when data is displayed on a diagram such as a bar chart, pie chart, graphs etc. We can collect lots of information about us and the world around us, but unless we are able to display this data and communicate it clearly, then it is useless. This is why it is important to visualise data well.
Nicolas Felton is a designer who is well known for documenting his life and using diagrammatic data to display it. He done this for 10 years, from 2005 to 2014. Every year he would release his report showing all of this data. He would track data such as emails, where he traveled, what he ate etc. Below are some different pages from different years of his reports, and I live how he visualises the data that he records and communicates it clearly yet uniquely in each one. I’m sure that these were very meticulous to collect and design, but I think that they look very creative. Even the typography and colours he use look great, highlighting different areas that he wants to bring attention to.
James Round is another designer who’s focus is on displaying visual data in diagrammatic ways. He is very good at making complex data easy to follow and understand. He mostly creates infographics and one that I found quite interesting was his “James Webb: Staring into Space” infographic. This was done for the BBC, who wanted an engaging and fun infographic on the James Webb Telescope. Although the information that is being displayed is quite complex and heavy, he makes it understandable to people who wouldn’t be familiar in this field. He uses fun typography and cool visuals which help make the infographic more interesting.
We then watched a documentary on World War II and how it had an effect on the world, specifically world population and peace-making statistics. This video was very cool to watch as it showed a lot of data using bar charts, line graphs and pie charts, but also used a cool infographic which showed the world birth numbers and the world death numbers in a hourglass. I thought that this was a interesting and unique way to show data, and it showed me that there are other ways than the usual types of diagrams to display data visually. As you can see this video won some awards for infographics, best motion infographics and more.
Todays class was very insightful as we learnt about how we can display data in a diagrammatic way, and we were shown some different examples of this and they were discussed, what made them good and how we can implement some of the techniques into our own work, especially the project that we are doing at the minute, which is creating a dashboard that shows some information from week in our life.