-: All right, hey folks.
So we're gonna do what we usually do here
is look at a few examples
and now we're thinking about the design,
not necessarily the chart selection, the storytelling
et cetera, here relates about the design.
That's what this week is all about.
So first, looking at a plate full of plastic,
visualizing the amount of microplastic we eat.
This comes from Reuters.
You know, I use their examples a lot
'cause they do great work.
And by the way, you'll notice all of the Reuters stories
use the same color palette, right?
They always have this blue and mostly white.
Otherwise, you know, they're very consistent branding.
Anyways, so this is a journalistic story
explaining the fact that we eat microplastic.
All right, well what's microplastic?
That's probably your first question.
Fair enough, it's my first question and they cover it.
Here's what microplastic is.
Sesame seeds, microplastic.
Okay, now I know what it is.
How much do we eat?
They get to that very quickly.
Every week, five grams.
All right, what's a gram?
What's five grams?
Well talk to me in ounces
'cause I'm from the US, only ounces make sense.
Two ounces or whatever it is.
I still don't know that is in terms of eating.
How about you show me.
A hot and sour soup spoon heaping full.
All right, I get it.
How about every month?
Four weeks time, four times five is 20.
So about 20 grams, 21 it turns out.
A nice bowl, half full, okay?
Every six months, a big cereal bowl.
Every year, a heaping plateful.
So not a chart insight,
just beautifully designed photography
with these striking colors.
And most importantly, it's making the data relatable.
If you had told me I eat 250 grams of plastic a year,
I would be just sitting there
like thinking to myself like, what's a gram?
How many ounces is that?
Like, I would've no clue what that even means.
A heaping plateful.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Like, this is visceral.
I get it.
This is strong communications.
The choirs are all over this thing, right?
This is, like we're talking about eating stuff.
So make it about eating stuff.
Like, how could you do this better?
And beautifully, simply designed.
Okay, another example, this is from "The New York Times."
179 reasons you don't need to panic about inflation, okay?
This is a scrolly telling experience.
As you scroll, the story progresses.
I love these.
I make these myself.
So, here's how the price of gasoline changed each month
throughout 2019 compared to the previous year.
So we can see that the price of gasoline
almost entirely went down.
It went up a couple few months here and there,
but then coronavirus came
and then what happened later in the year in 2021,
inflation and price of gasoline went bananas, right?
So the reason I'm showing this
is these visualizations which we will see again
and again and again throughout the story, are very simple.
All they are is what's called a strip plot.
It's a bunch of strips of color, okay?
Each one representing this yes or no,
up or down, good or bad,
although in this case also intensity of color, how much?
Right?
Now, these strips of color
also have these little up and down pointers, right?
But that's just a dual encoding mechanism.
Red means bad, blue means good.
Red means the price went up, blue means the price went down.
So there's just dual encoding
it with color and the direction.
It's a good strategy.
By the way, "The New York Times"
doing what I mentioned earlier
using red and blue instead of red and green.
Now, one of the things I love about this data story
is that the entire data story
is exclusively using this visualization.
These, you know, all repeated again and again and again.
Now, I think I've made the point already, I'll say it again.
It makes sense to keep things fresh and interesting
for your audience.
For your projects,
don't show up with 10 slides of bar charts.
But if you are doing one single task
and you have multiple slides about it
or in this case an entire data story
all about that one single idea
of how did inflation perform over time
for a hundred different categories,
of course you should use the same visualization.
Otherwise, I'll be distracted trying
to figure out why you changed that.
To the point about, by the way,
not using just bar charts for your projects,
just pick something different.
Use lollipop charts or some other option
that does a good job for a comparison,
assuming that's your task.
There are other options, okay?
All right, so another little detail
about this data story that I love is this.
Look at this, inline visualization.
New category, plane tickets comes up, boom.
This little teeny strip plot right there.
Fantastic.
This is a great data story.
Really nicely done, beautifully visualized,
very creative ideas.
But like you see,
the entire data story with like one exception
is all those visuals.
Okay?
Here's another one from "Der Spiegel"
looking at the recent protests in Iran.
And so as you go through the data story, you know,
really good data storytelling, a lot of video in here
to sort of support what's going on.
And then we see this map and we see the map of Iran.
And by the way, little design comment here,
the outline of the map,
the border is nice, thick, high contrast black line.
This is Iran.
The provinces are very subtle, thinner, gray lines.
You know, a lot of times we're using software
to create our maps
and the software just makes all the lines the same weight,
the same color, et cetera.
But we can make decisions about this.
From a design standpoint,
this is a lot easier to read.
I can still see where the provinces are,
but especially when we start layering more information
on it like all the protests,
I'm not distracted by the province borderers.
So this is another scrolly telling experience,
text scrolls by, some in-line videos scroll by,
telling the story of these protests.
But as I can see from the legend, the key
the bubble size shows me how many protests there were.
And of course the location tells me where they were.
So yeah, Tehran is the largest bubble,
clearly the largest population
but they're big protests and you know smaller,
but still decent number of protests all over the country
which many people probably wouldn't be aware of.
Long story short, as this story progresses
we get a little design nuance that comes in,
which comes in very soon.
Here we go.
Look at these evocative trails of blood, right?
Bringing some emotion, some humanity into the story
as it talks about the people,
you know specific people whose lives
are actually lost during these protests.
Beautifully done.
Great design.
I believe that these dots are reflecting the provinces
from which, you know, where the protests occurred
where then these people passed
after the protest or during the protest.
So just, you know, nice design, very evocative.
Part of storytelling is connecting with people emotionally.
Not always, but this is one of the ways of doing it.
Last but not least, visualizing the biomass of life.
This is a great infographic, came out a couple years ago.
What we're looking at here
is if you took all animals,
every animal on earth, and you weighed just their carbon.
So that element, that actually is sort of like the core
of all living beings, right?
Carbon.
Literally just weigh the carbon of all animals.
Arthropods, it would add up to one gigaton of carbon.
The next largest group by this weight would be fish.
Then annelids and then da, da, da, da, da.
Humans are down here.
Birds make up the least of all biomass
if you weighed their carbon, okay?
If you just reduced us all to just carbon.
Then, by the way, we noticed that this is actually animals.
But look at it in context with plants.
Ridiculously, you know, multiply this by a factor of,
I don't even know how many, a hundred or something,
50, 30, whatever it is.
Bacteria, way more biomass is from bacteria
than from animals et cetera, et cetera.
So why do I show this one in this segment about design?
Well, a couple things.
One, this is using 3D charts
and I mentioned the other day 3D is terrible,
don't use 3D, but sometimes 3D works.
Works here, I love it.
Does not distract.
I feel like I do understand the relative comparisons
of things.
No harm to the 3D here.
Secondly, really nice color palette.
You know, bright, fresh colors.
So even though I'm all about do less minimalism,
I love Reuters all gray, except for that one blue,
you know, if you can pull it off
and very few people can so be cautious.
Some people have a really good sense of color
and can put together a pretty diverse color palette
and it works.
So if you can do that, you're a very lucky person.
Finally, I say do less.
Yes, do less.
Overall, this is a pretty simple design.
It's just a bunch of cubes.
But they weren't afraid to also put the crab
and the barnacles and the other stuff on here.
This is really not do less, right?
So, thoughtful creative design
with an overall do less spirit
meaning that it's just cubes.
The design is subtle still,
the colors it's not distracting me.
This is beautifully designed.
And the information hierarchy is cool too.
'Cause it starts off with animals, a thing we care about.
And then with the sort of the punchline,
it's like, ooh, look,
but we're like nothing compared to bacteria, right?
So like the way it flows vertically even makes sense.
So good lessons in layout, good lessons in color,
good lessons in doing less
simultaneously with lessons in don't be too uptight
about doing less.
So, that's what I got for you here today.
A bunch of really cool examples.
I hope you've latched onto at least 5, 10, 15 little ideas
in here that will influence the work that you do
in your capstone project
which is now coming up pretty darn fast.
Can't wait to see it all.