Behind the Bond

Information is Beautiful recently closed a challenge to visualise data from 50 years of James Bond movies. As ever I found the topic and data they provided really interesting so I could not resist giving it a go. Saakshita Prabhakar has already blogged about her entry so I thought I would do something similar and run through some of my decision processes.  

Some of my recent projects have involved some quite large datasets, so initially it came as somewhat a relief to have something considerably smaller for once. When working in this way the data must be really focussed to answer the key questions. For me the compelling question I really wanted an answer to was ‘Which actor made the best James Bond?’

Much of the data provided appeared irrelevant to answering this question, number of Martinis drunk per movies didn’t hold my interest for long, although it was quite interesting to see Brosnan's movies contained a lot more killing and less kissing than the others. I eventually decided to narrow it right down to two really key bits of information, critics scores and box office revenue adjusted for inflation.

Without going into too much detail I experimented with a few ways to display these two sets of data. Ordering the movies along a common baseline seemed like the way to go to make comparisons easy, but this did not make for a very interesting looking visual. I wanted to incorporate a Bond theme into the visual style using predominately black, white and red, however this became impossible once I decided to represent each actor using colours. The final piece contains none of the theming elements I once hoped a James Bond piece would, and that for me is somewhat regrettable, however communicating the data is always my primary intention. I look forward to seeing other people’s approaches to the task.

Click here to enlarge

So what does the final piece tell us? Firstly it appears I am really out of touch with the critics, I grew up in the GoldenEye era and prefer the Brosnan movies over the others I have seen. These films however are considered some of the worst, but more surprisingly I discovered that Rodger Moore has an even lower average critic rating and dominates the bottom of the chart. Timothy Dalton, whose films were reviewed quite well, suffered badly at the box office. The undisputed master at playing Bond is Sean Connery who features heavily at the top in both cases. Daniel Craig is the second most sucessful Bond financially and has varied in quality according to the critics. It will be interesting to see how the response to the upcoming Skyfall this October will affect his legacy. 

Round pegs and square holes

Circular forms have become a very fashionable method in an attempt to visually communicate data. Their popularity is somewhat perplexing given the additional challenges they present to both the designer and user, but it seams we just can’t get enough of them. Neither clarity nor efficiency appear to be issues of major concern when these forms are used, however perhaps that is where the secret to their success lies.

Olympic Evolution, Alicia Korn

I came across this piece by Alicia Korn a few months ago and was inspired to create an Olympic graphic of my own. Olympic Evolution displays the competing counties over the years. We immediately get a sense of enormous growth in participants from 1896 to 2008, and the absence of the event during the wars is stark, but some of the finer details become obscured by those curves. Looking at this we may assume that the number competing in the last four events has decreased slightly year-on-year, although without counting I expect this is quite the opposite and this illusion is due to the longer circumference of the outer most circles. Having the counties scattered like this makes it challenging to spot any abnormalities, for example can you identify the year the United States did not attend from the graphic alone? All the necessary information is present, but it is not ordered in a way we can process efficiently. The viewer is unquestionably challenged, but maybe that is why I feel so intrigued by it and ultimately rewarded once I have invested a little time. My favorite visualisations are those which immediately grab our attention and sustain our interest over time, and for me this wins on both counts.

When it came to creating my own Olympic visualisation, using data on gold medals won by nation and sport, I wanted to combine engaging visuals with deeper analytics, and not for the first time I decided to split the task in two by first providing an overview, followed by an opportunity to take a more in-depth look and discover the stories within the data. The circular section at the top will hopefully act as the bait, encouraging viewers to come closer and get a general sense of the scale of the data involved. The grids below are designed with clarity and efficiency in mind and should satisfy those who wish to drill down deeper. See the finished piece >here.

Gold, Ben Willers

Does it succeed? How could it be improved? As ever I am eager to hear any thoughts.

>
For further reading see my dissertation on area encoding >here.

Lost in Space

Sharing work online can be a lonely experience. Presenting face to face will always generate some kind of reaction, but for all its size the internet sometimes feels very dark and empty, leaving me wondering how my efforts are being received. Page loads and unique visitors are rather crude measures of success, I would much prefer well considered, constructive thoughts left directly through the likes of Flicker or Visual.ly, but rarely does anyone take the time to do this. I am far more likely to uncover comments planted elsewhere, twitter for example, or like last week when I unearthed a brief discussion on my Eurovision piece on (of all places) an Arsenal football club forum.

Perhaps the biggest indication that my work has made an impact comes when others are inspired to create work based upon my own. This may be as straightforward as reusing a colour pallet I created, seen in this example by Jon Schwabish.

Top: Ben Willers.  Bottom: Jon Schwabish 

Sometimes a lot more is borrowed, my World of CO2 piece has clearly struck a chord with volkanolmez who has not only reused the colours for each country precisely, but also the title of the piece and time period from my original. To be honest I prefer my version for a number of reasons (which I will cover in a future post), but seeing my work inspiring others is very rewarding.

Left: Ben Willers. Right: volkanolmez

A more successful piece comes from David Heyman who replied shortly after my Eurovision piece was featured on the Guardian Datablog.
‘I was inspired by this graphic (and the availability of the data) to make an interactive / animated version. It's the same grid concept but the interactivity lets you define a custom date range or playback an animation.
I'm not sure I've gained any new insight into the data from presenting it this way (other than the obvious 'neighbors vote for each other') but maybe there's still something to be learned.’

I limited myself to ten years in my static version, but the interactive nature of this piece allows us to explore much further back than that. With a little effort and a keen eye we can uncover many more trends than I was able to in my attempt. I had great fun playing with various years selected to identifying at what point the UK became so unpopular.

David Heyman

I'm sure I am not the only one who likes to hear how their work has been received, so next time you see something that generates a reaction, don't be afraid to let the designer know.

Why I love Eurovision

A common misconception is that the beauty in visualisations comes from clever uses of colours, shapes and layouts. All are incredibly important things to consider for a piece to communicate efficiently, but without a solid foundation of really fantastic data a visualisation will always fail in my eyes. I dread having to visualise small tidbits data provided by clients as there is seldom any advantage in doing so and no opportunity to enhance the readers understanding.

That is why working on my latest project was such a pleasure.

The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual televised competition between European countries who each get to perform and vote for their ‘favorite.’ It’s well known that blocks of countries regularly exchange big points year on year to the same countries, although they would no doubt argue that is a result of sharing similar musical tastes. The most famous example is Greece and Cyprus who have awarded each other maximum points on every occasion in the past 15 years. Once I started digging through the voting tables I begin to uncover other startling consistencies, and once visualised a whole lot more began to emerge.

>Click here to enlarge

The final result highlights these voting trends even more clearly than I dared hope and shows off the real potential of visualising data. Whereas before we would need to intensively study and compare tables of numbers, the patterns now jump out and are impossible to ignore. I must admit I am quite excited for the 2012 contest next weekend (26 May). Not because of the singing of course, I will be following the voting and predicting who that elusive twelve points will be going to.

To see this and more of my work visit my website by clicking here: 
lifeindata.site50.net

Visualising Data Day

I first became aware of Andy Kirk's visualising data workshops while studying for my MA last year, however pressures on time meant I never got around to attending. Having now earned my degree, found a job and with holidays to take I decided to visit a London event to help fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge. As these events are intended as an introduction to the subject I was conscious that we would be covering a lot of ground which I was already familiar with, however I was also keen to get an opportunity to discuss visualisation with others who have an interest in this field, something I have sorely missed since graduating from uni.

Many of the subjects covered in the early sections were indeed quite familiar to me, in fact it was amassing how closely it overlapped with the themes and examples used in my own >dissertation, including charts from Florence Nightingale and studies into visual perception from Cleveland and McGill. For everyone else in the room who had not read so extensively around this subject this would have been a real eye opener. For me it just confirmed how much reading I managed to cram into last summer.

Hearing Andy speak throughout the day from his own personal experiences while sharing his own thoughts was really interesting, and it is reassuring to know that both him and I appear to think along similar wavelengths. An example of this came up a few times when he mentioned the importance of leaving the reader feel rewarded, providing the reward is greater than the effort needed to decode the information. This is something I have touched on a number of times in my writing, including in the The Billion Pound-O-Gram analysis in my dissertation, and something I constantly strive to achieve in my own work.

Another highlight for me was the group tasks, especially when we were provided with a series of visualisations and were asked to evaluate them based on a number of criteria. Diversity within the groups ensured that on occasions we had to agree to disagree, especially on a visualisation by Krisztina Szucs examining movie Rotten Tomatoes scores, budgets and profitability, a piece I have previously examined >here. By far the most difficult task for me was right at the end when we were provided with a spreadsheet of both quantitative and qualitative data and were asked how we would set about visualising it. Once again a mixture of talents and backgrounds among those participating ensured a range of different and interesting responses.

Whether you are an aspiring data visualiser or have an apatite to grow further I encourage you to attend one of these events when one arrives near you. Failing that everyone should at least take a listen to a series of >podcasts from Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner on which Andy has recently appeared as a guest.

Further information on these courses as well as a list of venues both in the UK and abroad can be found on the Visualising Data website >here.

Stacking

I’ve lost count of the number of energy mix charts I’ve seen in the last few weeks, and practically all infuriate me. There have been pie charts in abundance that have succeeded in making the information completely unreadable, and the remaining stacked area and bar diagrams do a pretty good job of obscuring much of what is relevant or interesting. Take this fine chart for example:

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/eag/232692.htm

The only values we can reliably compare are the total installed capacity and those for nuclear as these are the only two which share a common baseline. Take a moment to study the growth of natural gas (red) in the early part of the chart, as the elevation for each bar is determined by the values below it we are forced to judge each segment individually before making comparisons between it and its neighbours.

I recently came across some energy consumption data for the UK since 1970 and came up with an alternative method of display. The light grey bars are used to show the total energy consumption, and a breakdown of either the fuel type or sector are shown within. Crucially though all elements for comparison are shown along the same baseline which hopefully makes trends easier to follow.

Click here to enlarge

I did consider applying notes to this chart to highlight historical events that may have influenced the data, Thatchers election as prime minister in 1979 or the coal miners strike in 1984 for example. I don’t feel that my role is to provide all the answers though, just the facts in a digestible manner. I hope though that the well informed reader will make these connections themselves and as such will feel rewarded by their intelligence.

To see this and more of my work visit my website by clicking here: 

lifeindata.site50.net

Update 1
Comments below make reference to the following images,

Image 1. Chris Twigg

Image 2. Ben Willers

Update 2

To read more about this visualisation click >here to visit The Guardian Datablog.

You are all explorers now

I observe many infographics which serve no real purpose other than to convey a simple statistic that could quite easily be expressed in just a few simple words. These visuals are the bullet points in our field, spoon-feeding the reader with snippets of information that they are forced to accept at face value. While it is true that they serve a purpose as far as attracting attention, they do nothing to encourage exploration or allow the reader to contemplate deeply about the subject. I don’t have a problem with this practice as such, however it is important to carefully consider the needs of the audience and I see these types of visuals being used far more frequently than I think is useful. It would be easy to point fingers at the designer at this point, citing a lack of effort or understanding of the subject. The culprit though can probably be traced back to poor data selection from the outset. No matter how talented an individual is in bringing data to life, if that data is merely just a few predetermined percentages extracted from a paragraph of text there is little that can be done. On many occasions those asked to visualise this data would not be permitted to introduce new information of their own, possibly through fear that the visual will tell a different story from what the client intended. Designers are asked to mold this data in a similar fashion to an artist molds clay, except you wouldn’t provide an artist with poor quality clay from the Early Learning Center and expect a masterpiece.

Having worked within the journalism field for a few moths now I know of these frustrations first hand. I feel incredibly lucky though that I am given a reasonable amount of freedom to research around the stories we cover and introduce new data which I feel is worth exploring. Until now I have always created charts for articles that were being written, however my latest piece is from a dataset I stumbled across and though would be worth exploring regardless of its relevance to any particular current event. It examines 24 countries in Europe and their commitment to renewable energy. This is not designed to answer a predefined question or tell a story in a particular way. This lack of initial guidance therefore requires a certain amount of effort on the readers part, however the freedom this approach offers much appeal to myself and highlights the real potential of information design.

Click here for larger version — iPad users click here

Once again I have used per capita figures because I believe that this is the fairest way to compare countries of various sizes. More specifically I have used population figures of those of working age to show what percentage of the total workforce is employed in renewables. Likewise I have shown the amount of turnover from these sectors as a percentage of each countries GDP. I’m not going to offer any further explanation, I hope you will take a little time to scrutinise over it yourselves and make your own discoveries. As ever I would really appreciate any feedback on this as I hope to push this type of work in the future.

The article that was written to accompany this graphic can be seen >here

Beware of the bubbles

This morning I came across this >article

I find it difficult to believe that an organisation so intrinsically linked with data as Nelsen can fall into one of the biggest visualisation traps around. Their site states, “We believe providing our clients a precise understanding of the consumer is the key to making the right decisions.” I seriously doubt any reader of the following diagram will receive an accurate impression.

Take a moment to compare some of the numbers shown with the circles presented. Do you get the impression that for TV Shows the blue circle is 4 times the size of the orange one? It’s unlikely, because the designer in this case has scaled the circles using their diameter values. There is no escaping the fact that the brain will naturally try to compare their areas, thus it is necessary to take square roots of the data beforehand. Some alternatives to the Downloaded Music part are shown below.

In fact the area method is far from perfect, notice how difficult it is to compare values of 19 and 20? Had the percentages not been shown we may have assumed they were identical. The bar method is far superior for communicating quantities precisely. Chapter 1 of my dissertation from last year examines this in greater detail.

Dissertation >here

Nelsen are currently running a data visualisation competition, unfortunately only residents of the United States are permitted to enter. Nonetheless I await the results with bated breath.

Teacher for the day

I was recently asked if I could return to the University of Lincoln for a day to speak to the second year Graphic Design group who are currently in the middle of there own data visualisation projects. They have already covered many of the principles of graph design and are now at a stage where many are keen to increase the aesthetic appeal of their work. There were 80 or so students split across morning and afternoon sessions. After a group review of their practical work from the previous week I talked about some of the work I produced on the MA program, competitions entered since then and some of the stuff I am currently producing for Blue & Green. I also talked them through my development process and shared some of my thoughts on balancing form and function. By far my favorite part of the day was when after finishing both of the sessions small groups of really keen individuals came to ask questions, discuss problems they were having and take a look at the MA log books which I had brought in. Reading the blog of Katie Ulett later that night really made my day.

View >here

The groups task is now to use provided dataset on energy consumption to produce an A1 data visualisation poster. I must admit I am very keen to give it a go myself, I haven't seen the spreadsheets yet but hopefully I can make it relevant to my work for Blue & Green. I saw some promising work today, hopefully I will get an opportunity to see some of the final outcomes.

Beauty, in the eye of the beholder

Information is Beautiful have tonight announced the winners for their latest design challenge. Once again I was lucky enough to have my entry featured in the shortlist, however hopes of a second win were later dashed. The winning design would not have been my personal pick, and the early reaction on twitter that I have observed suggests others share a similar view. So I thought it would be interesting to look a little deeper at some of the other entries and discuss my favourites.

See the winners >here
Shortlist >here

Hollywood Budgets by Barinov Tëma replicates the visual style of McCandless’s Billion Pound-O-Gram, even down to the rounded off corners which I suspect are applied after the data has been encoded, unless they have devised a rather clever formula to do this. I found the information within genuinely interesting though as I often have little knowledge of what studio is responsible for which movies and I appreciate the split down view to allow comparisons to be made between years. These treemaps though make the data even more difficult for the brain to decode than pie charts since the segments are not only scattered around the page in a state of disarray, they are often of completely different shape, and if the figures were not given we would be forced to make wild estimations based on area alone, often a recipe for disaster. Despite all this I got a reasonable amount of enjoyment exploring this visual and feel the information obtained has made a lasting impression.

Spotlight of Profitability by Krisztina Scuzzies compares Rotten Tomatoes scores against budget and worldwide gross. This was a something I experimented with showing in my own design and I found some interesting patterns. The crucial question the reader will probably want answers to is, “Does a critics score influence box office performance?” This visualisation certainly doesn’t make answers to such questions easy and its a pity that more movies could not be compared directly without appearing cluttered, however I found myself getting more enjoyment and information out of it as I put more effort in. The sharp clean visual style and colours used appeal to me greatly and on an aesthetic level alone this is easily my favorite.

Congratulations to all that got shortlisted. As ever I look forward to seeing what designs emerge from the next challenge.

Hollywood Loves Pies

Hollywood Loves Action, Saakshita Prabhakar

I recently received a tweet of support for my recent Information is Beautiful competition entry from Saakshita Prabhakar. She later asked if I could provide some feedback on the Visual.ly site for the piece she submitted. These were my impressions:

Comparison of pie chart segments can be extremely difficult since it can be challenging to measure angles or arc lengths with our eyes alone, especially when we are required to make comparisons between many diagrams distributed around a page. I like how in this image many of these problems have been eliminated. Firstly each segment begins at the standard 12 o’clock position which instantly makes things much easier as we are not required to use our brains to rotate them ourselves. By highlighting the 10% intervals we are also provided with a series of perceptual anchor points which our eyes make great use of when making quick comparisons between different areas of the page. We are also able to count these bars and accurately decipher the corresponding percentage if that is our intention, a task which would be almost impossible using standard pie charts.

The clean, uncluttered style makes it a joy to read, even the legend at the bottom looks lovely. It would work great as an interactive piece where the reader could expand each section to see which other movies came out in that period.

I wonder if it would have been possible to somehow also show total box office takings as well as a percentage of the total for that year? I say this because it appears on this diagram that Kung Fu Panda 2 did better than Toy Story 3, however this is not the case. Dreamwork's picture only did better in relation to everything else from that particular year.

My preference would have been to arrange the years progressing from left to right since that is how I preattentively expected them to appear, but its really not a big issue and they are labeled clearly enough.

Very nice work, I look forward to seeing what you produce for the next one!

Money troubles

(See the enlarged version on my website here)

I always enjoy reading the comments from others on my work. Of course its always great to hear the positive, but constructive criticisms are also tremendously helpful. Roman Griesfelder writes on Google+ about my €uro Recession piece:


“I like the classic style.
Still I have a hard time understanding the middle part (Debt % of GDP).


My first thought was:
Why are there positive and negative numbers for the %? Is it possible to have a negative percentage of debt? Certainly not.


My second thought was:
Look closer!


My third thought was:
Can't be true! What I perceived as zero (the point where green becomes red), is not zero. It is 100%. 


My fourth thought was:
That means, that numbers greater than 100 go up and numbers lower than 100 go down.
But no, it is the other way round! 50 is above 100 is above 150.


It means, that numbers smaller than 100 make the columns go up when they decrease. This is hard to understand. For the eye countries like Luxembourg or Estonia (on the far right) have the highest % of debt. But actually they have the smallest.


I think it is not very helpful to show it like this.”


I replied to this post with the following message:

Hi Roman,
Thank you for your thoughts on this, I gave this aspect a great amount of consideration when I designed this visualisation and I selected a method which I feel presents the data in the clearest and most logical manner to someone without any previous knowledge of this issue. I hope I can clarify a little more. The intention of this piece is to highlight the relationship between two factors that have positive and negative effects on each countries economy. The positive effect (GDP) is shown using bars progressing upwards. The negative effect (debt) is shown by bars moving downwards. The colours green and red were also selected because of the connotations they share with growth and contraction. Between the two we see how these factors balance out by showing the amount of debt expressed as a percentage of GDP. If the amount of debt is equal to it’s GPD, debt will be show as 100% of GDP. We can consider this to be the baseline with the economies performing well represented above it, and those in trouble below. Greece has levels of debt almost one and a half times it’s GDP, shown on the chart as nearly 150%. This is not a good situation for Greece! It was really important for me to show this negative situation using the same idea expressed before, that is red bars moving downwards and below the baseline. Countries such as Luxembourg and Estonia who (for very different reasons) have very low levels of debt when expressed as a percentage of GDP, are shown using the green bars growing upwards above the baseline.

As you point out it would normally be expected that a y-axis is labeled with the smallest figures at the bottom, however if this was the case in this example the poorly performing countries would feature bars progressing upwards, which is a contradictory impression to the one which I felt was appropriate. Of course this issue would have been avoided had I chosen to instead show GDP as a percentage of debt, however this would have had a dramatic effect of the scale required since the figures then range between 70% and 2,701%. In a test this produced a highly unbalanced appearance which I believe would not have been a good choice for the purpose of comparison between countries in this case.

When designing any piece of visual communication it is of course vital to consider the general rules and conventions which readers will approach you work with. However as you may be able to tell from my work I enjoy challenging these conventions if I feel there is a more interesting or logical alternative, or if it offers a fresh view of the data that can lead to new levels of understanding.

Many thanks for your thoughts on this and allowing me to share some of my approaches to design.

Ben Willers



Update:
Roman has produced an alternative to my version. I reply:

Hi Roman. Its great to see an alternative way of showing this data. I still prefer my version if I'm honest, however I understand your concerns and appreciate that different methods of visualisation work for different audiences. I have found this discussion tremendously useful and hope that both our practices will benefit as a result.

All the best,
Ben

Birth of Life

At this point nine months ago myself and five others were franticly putting the finishing touches to the work we were each submitting for our MA Design Major Project. I had almost everything prepared for the Monday hand in by the Thursday before, there was just one more thing I desperately needed to do. Its funny (and somewhat scary) to think that my Life chart, the piece that has received the most positive feedback of all my work very nearly didn't happen at all. I had it planned out weeks before in my sketchbook, however I only began the process of building it in Illustrator with four days to go. Thankfully I encountered few problems in its construction and it closely resembles how I imagined it would from the drawings. However it took especially long, all Saturday afternoon and evening in fact to get to a stage where I was happy with the colours. As I experimented with various pallets (while watching Breakfast at Tiffany's in the background) I suddenly noticed the resemblance to an eye when a dark circle was placed in the centre.

At the time of writing this the chart has been viewed 1,105 times on Flickr, and undoubtedly many more times across other websites including my own. I have received two emails this month alone from people contacting me for the first time asking about it. It was the first piece of work that I sold at the MA design show, and you know you are doing something right when Nicholas Felton includes it in his personal blog.

This piece didn't feature in my MA Design log books as it ran too close to the deadline, however much of the other work I produced is documented and available to view in detail on my website. (click here)


Ben

Make blogs, read blogs

For two years now I have been asked continuously by friends and tutors if I blog. Back then I don't think I could have imagined anything worse. No one would be interested in my random thoughts I thought, and besides, writing anything at all is an ordeal for me as I constantly rewrite and restructure anything I have just typed. (I'm doing it now). Even texting a friend takes me far longer than it needs to.

At this point last year I was just beginning the major project phase of my MA in Graphic Communication and was rapidly collecting data on myself that I could turn into data visualisations. I've always been a private person, and then all of a sudden through my work I was revealing all kinds of habits and interests. Others on the course were enthusiastic about my work and so I decided to share them online. 

In July 2011 things went a bit crazy, views of my work on Flickr jumped overnight and I was receiving messages of support and questions about my methods from all over the world. (If you were one that got in contact then thank you very much). I later discovered that one of the most well known information designers Nicholas Felton had blogged my work. 

Since then I began to use Twitter and through here I discovered the Information is Beautiful competitions. In fact my entry won first prize and earned me $2,000. The publicity generated yet more interest in my work which lead to me producing a visualisation for Qatar based news group Al Jazeera. In short I believe the internet is a truly amazing thing and I intend to make the most of it.

I am currently looking at improving my website to include my more recent work and I'm also looking at adding a section that explains my general design process and tools since I have had so many people asking about this through email. This blog will provide further reading as new projects and challenges come my way, and I also hope to share and discuss some of the work from others which I find most interesting or relevant.

I have already revealed a lot about myself, but there will be much more to come. Attached is an image of my favorite place to work.

Thanks for reading and I hope this proves interesting.

Welcome.


Ben