Obamacare: The Price of Socialized Medicine

The big news in the public health field in the U.S. is Obamacare. In response to its passing, Master of Public Health.org created The Price of Socialized Medicine: Obamacare’s Unconstitutionality by the Numbers infographic to give insight into how it will affect everyone.

The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, in a landmark 5-4 decision. Unfortunately, they got it wrong. The PPACA, known colloquially as Obamacare, should have been struck down by the high court, as it is both unconstitutional and very costly:

• Individual Mandate: Obamacare requires that all Americans carry health insurance or face an annual penalty. The federal government is effectively compelling individual citizens to enter a market, which is a clear violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The Supreme Court ruled that this was constitutionally valid as within Congress’ taxing power.
• Medicaid Expansion: As the original Act is written, the PPACA would require states to expand Medicaid support or risk having their entire Medicaid federal funding cut off. This infringes on states’ rights. Fortunately, the Supreme Court did rule against these sanctions.

In response to the ruling, we have produced an infographic titled, “The Cost of Socialized Medicine: Obamacare’s Unconstitutionality by the Numbers”, which illustrates the folly of the PPACA as well as some of the costs that will be borne as a result.

Obviously, this design is promoting a specific opinion, but we’re here to discuss the infographic design itself.

• The design outlines a really good step-by-step story top-to-bottom, and summarizes the data behind their point of view clearly
• Good mix of illustrations and data visualization within each section.
• In general, there’s WAY too much text in the design.  They want to be thorough in their explanations, but this much text will turn away many readers from reading the infographic at all.  Also, most of the text is too small to read on their landing page.  Less text would have been more effective, and allowed for a larger font.
• The timeline looks like events along the heartbeat axis, but they aren’t spaced out appropriately to match their dates.
• I like the icon representation of the justices.  Just enough detail to be recognizable.
• Clear, easy to understand map of the costs to each state in the country map
• The sizes of the circles in the Cost of Obamacare section are close, but not quite accurately representing the dollar figures shown.  Some are larger than they should be, and a couple are smaller.  Almost like the sizes were eye-balled instead of calculated mathematically.  Odd.
• The states that have filed lawsuits would be easier to understand if the colored states were still placed within the map of the U.S.
• Good list of sources
• Need a copyright statement and the URL to the original infographic landing page for readers that find the infographic posted on the Internet to be able to find the original.

Thanks to Jimmy for sending in the link!

The Noun Project

Building a Global Visual Language from The Noun Project on Vimeo.

The Noun Project is beauty in its simplicity.

I post this video for two reasons:

1. Even though there are no statistics in the video, I do consider this to be an infographic video.  The video is a visual explanation that “shows” the audience icons and illustrations that convey the meaning of representing human concepts in visual form.
   
   
2. The Noun Project is a fantastic effort to design universal icons.  The idea is to design and gather illustrations of concepts that cross languages and cultures, and then make tham available to everyone under Creative Commons license to use in their own designs.  Obviously good for infographic design, but also for presentations, websites and even school reports.

From the Noun Project About Page:

Creating, Sharing and Celebrating the World’s Visual Language

The Noun Project is a platform empowering the community to build a global visual language that everyone can understand.

Visual communication is incredibly powerful. Symbols have the ability to transcend cultural and language barriers and deliver concise information effortlessly and instantaneously. For the first time, this image-based system of communication is being combined with technology to create a social language that unites the world.

Anyone can also register and submit their own designs to be considered for inclusion in the library.

Like designed by Marwa Boukarim from The Noun Project

Hurricanes Since 1851

Science meets art in the Hurricanes Since 1851 infographic from John Nelson, IDV Solutions, on UXBlog. The infographic maps out storm paths and wind speeds of hurricanes since 1851.  The photo is the projection view of the globe from the south pole perspective.

Ok, here’s a bottoms-up view of known tropical storms and hurricanes dating back to 1851.  The fine folks at NOAA keep an archive of storm paths with wind speed, storm name, date, among other attributes, and are always updating and refining information for past events based on historical evidence and educated hunches.  The data are awesome and they make it available in several formats.  Here’s what it looks like slapped onto a polar projection (looking up at Antarctica) with point color tied to intensity…

A couple of things stood out to me about this data…

1) Structure.
Hurricanes clearly abhor the equator and fling themselves away from the warm waters of their birth as quickly as they can.  Paging Dr. Freud.
The void circling the image is the equator.  Hurricanes can never ever cross it.

2) Detection.
Detection has skyrocketed since satellite technology but mostly since we started logging storms in the eastern hemisphere.  Also the proportionality of storm severity looks to be getting more consistent year to year with the benefit of more data.

Data visualization design reveals patterns and makes data understandable, and this is a huge, effective data visualization.

Thanks to Renee for sending in the link!

The Supernatural Sprawl of True Blood

The HBO phenomenon that captured our attention it’s first season has become hard to follow. The Supernatural Sprawl of True Blood infographic created by Jess Bachman from visual.ly breaks down the types of characters that have appeared so far in each season and each episode.

TrueBlood started as a show about the relationship between humans and vampires. But over the course of five seasons, the list of supernatural creatures has been steadily expanding. Love it or hate it, there are a lot of supes — and keeping track of them all is becoming increasingly complex. This infographic should help you sort it all out.

The design does a good job of using unique, recognizable illustrations for each type of creature, and then grouping them together for each episode.  It’s also very obvious that the episodes have consistently gotten more complicated as the show progressed.

Credit for the illustrations goes to Ilias Sounas, and thanks to Jess for sending in the link!

How-Many Guide to Kitchen Conversions

Designed by Shannon Lattin at S.B. Lattin Design, the Common Cook’s How-Many Guide to Kitchen Conversions is a super-helpful infographic design.  Very quickly the reader can lookup to the conversions between many of the most common recipe measurements.

If your kitchen drawers are anything like ours, you never have the right measuring implement for the recipe you’re tackling. Keep this chart on hand, and the next time you find yourself asking “How many…” you’ll know just what to do.

This design is an excellent example of “tell one story really well.”  It’s a clear and simple design that is quick and easy for the reader to understand.  

Found on Visual.ly

Nice job Shannon!

Honda Accord: 30 Years of U.S. Production

Honda Accord: 30 Years of American Craftmanship is a large infographic from Honda America that was released as part of the release of the new 2013 model design of the Honda Accord in August.  Designed by Jeremy Yingling with InfoNewt (my company) this is a very brand specific, marketing-style infographic.

IN 2012, HONDA WILL MARK 30 YEARS OF ACCORD PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES.

The first Japanese nameplate manufactured in the U.S., the second-generation Accord first rolled off the Marysville, Ohio assembly line in November of 1982. In the 30 years since, more than nine million U.S.-built1 Accords have helped define American manufacturing craftsmanship. The all-new 2013 Honda Accord will once again redefine space efficiency and driving joy in the midsize class, signaling the start of Honda’s next three-decade chapter of building the Accord in America. 

The 2013 model becomes the ninth major design generation of the Accord.  This gave us the opportunity to highlight differences each major model design has brought to the Accord over the last 30 years.  The design visualizes the major technical specifications, the major advancements included in the Accord and shows the multi-year periods that each design generation was available.  The eye-catching color-waterfall shows the available exterior colors available for every model year, and the milestones along the left-side of the design show the progression to reach a cumulative total over 9 million Accords produced in 2012 coming out of the manufacturing plant in Marysville, OH.

Honda has done a great job of utilizing this one infographic design in a handful of different ways.  The infographic was initially used as 9’ banners at the Honda press events, and included in the press kits provided to everyone invited to attend.  Honda has now released the infographic online on the Honda News page on Flickr, making the design available to everyone.

Update on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 10:00AM by Randy

You can see photos of the PR banner, read more about how the design was used in multiple ways by Honda PR and some “behind the design” information about the designing the infographic on the InfoNewt blog.

Honda Accord Infographic PR Banner, Behind the design

The History of Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse hasn’t just survived for 80 years, he has thrived. The History of Mickey Mouse infographic from Goin2Travel.com has condensed this famous mouse life style into a highlight timeline.

Mickey Mouse is the most recognizable Disney character on the planet. After more than 80 years of stardom, we thought it would be fun to review the history of this iconic mouse. From humble beginnings during the “roaring twenties”, surviving and even flourishing during the “great depression” right up to the digital age present, he and his fellow, Disney stars, are favorites of children everywhere.

So whether your planning a visit to Disney World Orlando, or just a fan,  sit back, relax, and enjoy this visual history trip through time of Mickey Mouse.

They did a good job of showing the reader actual images and photos of Mickey through the years, and I like the use of Mickey Hands as the arrowheads on the connecting lines.  

The biggest issue is that many of the images are so far away from the correct year along the righthand side, that it’s very hard to follow the connecting lines.  You really don’t want images from the 1950s visually placed next to 1970s on the timeline.  I would suggest putting the years down the middle and placing the event images on both sides so they can be adjacent to the actual time on the timeline.

The URL at the bottom should be a link to the original infographic instead of the frontpage of the company site.  You want readers to be able to find the original infographic when it’s not correctly linked on the Web.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

How Much Does SEO Cost? is generally a mystery in the online marketing world.  The range is certainly big, from under $50/month up to the unbelievable price of over $250,000/month!  This informative infographic shares the results of custom research from SEOmoz, and was designed by AYTM.

How much does SEO cost? How much time do you have to discuss the various models and prices out there! However, a new survey sheds some light on the subject.

Over 500 people and companies who offer search engine optimization services were asked about how their models. Turns out, it’s most common to charge $100 to $150 per hour, in the US. But by-the-hour consulting is only one of four nearly co-equal ways of charging.

Also popular is project-based pricing, where the average price is between $2,500 to $5,000, in the US. That’s also the same average price for those who buy on a monthly retainer basis. Fixed prices on a contract basis is also a popular way that SEO is sold, but no averages were provided.

The survey was conducted by SEOmoz and compiled into the infographic below by AYTM:

From a design standpoint, there are a lot of things I like about this infographic.  

The consistent columns for regions of the world make the layout very easy to follow.  The data is also organized nicely by starting with basic demographic data to provide a foundation to the reader before getting into “The Main Event” - the main research results.

The data visualizations are fairly simple, and very easy for the reader to understand.  I also like the variety of data visualization methods; no one wants to see all bar charts.  The color scheme is also simple, which visually implies a certain level of authority.  By taking complex data and designing simple visualizations, the design shows the readers that SEOmoz has a clear understanding of the content.

The actual values are not included in the design, which is disappointing.  Since this was custom primary research, I have no way to validate the data visualizations without seeing the data, and that reduces the credibility of the entire design.  From a sharing perspective, it’s hard to quote interesting statistics in a text Tweet or Facebook post without having the numbers to work with.

Legends are Evil!  My biggest complaint is their use of legends in a few sections.  In those charts, the colors are visually hard to differentiate, and the reader has to work very hard to understand which pie slice or bar goes with each color.  This is only a problem in the Agency Type and Common Client Types sections.  The rest do a good job of connecting the data labels directly to the visualization.

The footer should include some type of copyright statement, and the URL for readers to find the original infographic landing page.

Found on Visual Loop

Star Wars Infographic Flowcharts

Marc Morera has designed some amazing Star Wars infographics charting the character progression, deaths and conflicts in the Star Wars movies, the animated series, comic books and major novels.  On the landing page, you will find them organized chronologically, so the Animated Series fits in between movies II and III.

Characters are illustrated as recognizable isotypes.  Each character’s plot line is color-coded, and the lines from the appropriate characters converge at circles representing the major conflicts along each story timeline. 

The two examples shown here are reduced in size to fit on the blog, so go check out all of them on Marc Murera’s site for high-resolution versions.

Is Google+ a Ghost Town?

Google+, The newest trend? Or the newest flop? Umpf gets to the bottom of this mystery with a little research and reports it’s results with an infographic! The Google+, Ghost Town? infographic does more than just report the Google+ statistics, it compares them to other key social networks.

There’s been many articles written about how good, bad and indifferent Google+ is.  But our favourite debate is the ongoing It’s Really Popular Vs It’s A Ghost Town one.

So what’s the truth?  Our findings and infographic (see below) appear to suggest the latter: despite its large number of accounts, G+ is bottom of the list of social network users’ favoured channels.

Google, of course, claims it is fast-growing and really popular.  Why wouldn’t they? And, of course, there is research to support that argument. But does this chart, left, for example, which shows the rise in G+ unique visitors, tell the whole truth?

So, we decided to do our own research.  It is by no means exhaustive and is only meant as a snapshot view, so judge for yourself.

Certainly a trending topic lately, but also a really good infographic design.  Of course it’s framed in a Google+ news feed style layout.  Easy to read and colorful.  I like the color coding related to the different social network logos, even though some of those blue colors are hard to differentiate.

In the Users bar chart, I love the use of color, putting the data right in the bars and using the logos on the axis to eliminate any need for a legend.  Good data visualizations design!

In the “Users Likely to Share” I would have liked to see some sizing of the icons to match the data. Instead, they put the icon illustrations into rank order, continued the consistent color coding and clearly identified 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.

The section with all of the doughnut charts (reminiscent of the Google+ Circles icon) also continues the consistent color coding.  I’m sure it a rounding issue, but many of the charts only add up to 99.9% instead of 100%.

At the bottom, the two things missing are some type of copyright license as well as the URL linking back to the original infographic landing page.

Thanks to Jon for sending in the link!