Scientific Evidence for Health Supplements

The folks over at Information is Beautiful have put together a wonder infographic about different health supplements and their effectiveness for certain conditions. The higher the bubble in the graphic, the better evidence there is for its effectiveness and the bigger the bubble is, the more popular that supplement is on Google. Some supplements, such as green tea, have been linked to multiple conditions but with varying degrees of scientific evidence, so they have been separated into multiple bubbles. The full interactive infographic is here.

via Boing Boing

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The Mariana Trench to Scale

Ah, so simple, so clean, and totally gets the point across! The tiny black dot at the surface is a scale representation of a 6-foot tall human being, while the "little" animal swimming below it is a scale representation of the largest living creature on earth, a blue whale (although the image they used for it looks suspiciously like a fish). It's hard not to fully comprehend the scale of the Mariana Trench after looking at that. If you can't see them, the full size image is here.

(via Geekologie via I Am Bored)

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Dating Preferences Based on Age

The folks over at OKCupid are unusually awesome in that they not only constantly analyze the huge amount of data they receive from their large user base, but also freely and publicly publish the results of their finds on a frequent basis for the amusement and education of many. Their latest blog post features some really fascinating graphs about the age ranges people prefer to date within. Not only is the contrast between men and women strikingly (and well displayed), but they also put together some interactive infographics that allow users to see how preferences change as people get older. It's all very well written with some tongue and cheek humor and it's fun to look at. Check out the full post here.

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Self-deprecating Infographic

A hilarious infographic popped on Digg today that makes fun of the current design trends that characterize today's infographics that circulate around the web. This one in particular totally nails it: the huge fonts, bright colors and seemingly unrelated and random statistics double-represented by an unnecessary number of graphs scattered amongst clip art.

The original Digg can be found here.

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Different Scales

With the CARD Act coming into effect on February 22nd, an infographic has been going around to show current compliance among credit card companies and banks and what benefits and protections the CARD Act is supposed to provide to consumers and some random facts thrown in for good measure.

Although filled with good information, one thing immediately caught my attention: the percentage scales of the two "charts" on fees are subtly different, making the % households with unpaid balances look disproportionately smaller compared to the % that possess credit cards. The purpose of this difference in scale eludes me. Did the alignment not match up with respect to the text and arrow on the right-hand side? If anything, it would seem like they would want to have the scales the same or (if they wish to intentionally skew the chart to manipulate viewer perceptions) in reverse to make it appear as if even more households are in need of these protections.

Image via The Consumerist

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Layers of the Earth

Last week I put together an infographic on the earth's water cycle in the style of an old elementary school textbook. On further reflection, I felt that that entire art style was really not the direction that I wanted my infographic gallery to go in. Still, the water cycle poster inspired me to look into other earth sciences processes, so I decided my next graphic would be about the earth and atmosphere. After some poking around on the Internet, I kept coming across infographics that looked like this:

After looking at images like these, I decided to go in a very different direction from the classic, somewhat cluttered textbook/school poster look and instead go a lot simpler and cleaner with a bit of a retro feel. Here's the result:

A larger version of the image and full poster can be found here.

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Earth's satellites photo

Michael Paukner put together this great infographic on how many satellites are orbiting the Earth and what countries they belong to. I just love how clean it looks. The fake orbits add a lot of visual appeal to the whole graphic without distracting or taking away from the data presented. Fabulous!

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Vanity Barcodes

You may not normally associate the lowly barcode as an infographic as you watch it getting tossed in front of a product scanner at the supermarket, but believe it or not, they are. After all, an infographic is defined as the graphical representation of information or data, and a barcode does exactly that by translating a number into a visual form that machines can read.

Anyways, never mind the technical definition. What I wanted to share in this post was Vanity Barcodes, which takes standard barcodes and re-designs them into fun and playful graphics that still meet industry standard for machine scanning. Particularly what I love about their designs is the use of the barcode as a texture, and in some cases, as a method of shading.

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Applying Mathematical Principals to Design

The folks over at Smashing Magazine put out an article today about how to use math to design elegant web pages. Although not infographics, the design principles they mention are frequently applicable to designing clean and engaging infographics as well. Check out the full article here.

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A bit of nostalgia

Watching the Royksopp video the other day, the brief scene of showing where the water goes after the main character flushes the toilet reminded me of all those posters my elementary school teachers would cover their classroom walls with when I was a little kid. You know, the ones with the cartoon pictures showing the seasons or pictures of whales swimming next to scuba divers or cutaways of the Earth's mantle (oooh, that would be a great poster to do next!). Those posters have been a major inspiration and influence on me when putting together posters for my store, so I whipped together a quick poster on Saturday explaining the Earth's water cycle. I realized all the posters I've made so far were anatomy or biology based, so I thought it'd be fun to do a diagram on meteorology or geology. The water cycle seemed like a good compromise between the two. View the full-size poster here.

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A whole music video of visual information

Listening to Pandora this afternoon, I was reminded of a great music video by Royksopp that consisted entirely of cleverly animated charts and diagrams. The whole video is of a young woman going through her daily routine, from waking up in the morning to going to work. Everything she does, from taking the subway to work to her having lunch, is depicted through infographics. At the very least, the song itself is awesome and worth you checking it out:

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Kulula Airlines' new colors are self-explanatory

Kulula, a low-fare airline based out of South Africa, has unveiled the new paint jobs for their aircraft, and I have to say, they are spectacularly AWESOME! With little descriptions and arrows pointing to such features as "The Co-Pilot (the other pilot on the PA system," "Fuel Tanks (the go-go juice)" and "Loo (or mile-high initiation chamber)," they're a great example of how a little sense of humor can transform something as mundane as a commercial airliner into a fun infographic for all.

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Sci-Fi TV Shows in Periodic Table

Being kind of a geek (ok, maybe just straight up geeky), I always get a kick out of graphs depicting sci-fi television and movies. Condensed into periodic table format? Even better! I'm particularly amused they decided to clump Star Trek and Star Wars spinoffs/movies into one category though. Surely such a combination would make those elements more volatile.

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Image

With regard to my previous post, here's the graphic in question.

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The Federal Budget and Deficit

The Huffington Post just put up some interactive infographics on Obama's $3.83 trillion federal budget for 2011. Particularly interesting to me was how they chose to depict government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Using this measure, the numbers can be a bit deceptive because they don't also show fluctuations in actual government spending and GDP. For example, this graph implies at first glance that government spending dropped in the 1990s, when in reality the budget was slowly increasing from year to year (if you look at the numbers posted here) but the GDP was increasing at an even faster rate. All of the infographics can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/budget-2010/index.html

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How to Choose What Type of Chart to Use

In case you don't have the time to read any of Tufte's books about how to visually represent quantitative information, here's a nice little diagram to help you decide what type of chart to use.

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U.S. Paid Vacation Days vs Other Countries

The blog Sociological Images recently put up a fascinating graph comparing the US to OECD countries and its implications are grim: whereas most other countries have government policies requiring workers receive at least 10 paid vacation days a year, the US government has no requirements at all. Zero. Zip. Nada.

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Amusing Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

I found an amusing infographic poster regarding the hilariously cheesy B-movie, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. In one of the best scenes of the movie, the mega shark launches itself into the air and attacks a passenger aircraft flying high above the ocean. To demonstrate the utter ridiculousness and improbability of this stunt, someone put together a poster here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1350498/

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