JAWS

I’ve been meaning to post this one for a long time.  JAWS, designed by Robert Machuga, uses the design style of the movie poster to create this cool infographic that visualizes multiple dimensions of data from the movie.

From Robert:

This project was an assignment in my senior year at the Hartford Art School where my class had to dissect a movie and translate it into an infographic Each of the colored lines represents the location of each of the main characters in the film divided into beach, mainland, and ocean. The red icons represent each time a human was eaten while the green buoy icons represent danger in the water. The orange lifesaver icons appear when the shark eludes capture and the timeline across the bottom spikes in green at points of musical intensity while the blue spikes are moments of suspense. 

In approaching this project I really had to sit down with the film and the remote, fast forwarding and rewinding, trying to find the most pivotal events and themes that I could use to depict this movie in a static visual. I was trying to capture the thrill of the movie without loosing the story in the graph so I tried to break it down to it’s simplest forms. After many rounds, encouragement and great advice from professor John Nordyke I was left with the graph I have now. 

Nice job Robert!

Digital Marketing Budgets

The Digital Marketing Budgets infographic from 6smarketing.com is a digital marketing calculator to help businesses determine what they should be allocating marketing in 2012.

Below are statistics 6S Marketing uncovered during research to determine what percentage of marketing budgets organizations are currently allocating towards digital marketing, and what we can expect to see digital marketing budgets to look like in 2012. We’ve also created an infographic to illustrate these, and a digital marketing calculator to help businesses determine what they should be allocating to digital marketing in 2012.

SEO and social media marketing currently make up 70% of online marketing budgets. Overall, 24% of budgets were spent on digital marketing in 2011. Although the percentage of budgets that include online marketing tactics increase every year, 28% of organizations are in the process of moving their marketing budgets to digital channels.

There are some great charts, a great color scheme and really valuable information in this infographic, and I love that they included a number of different chart styles.  However, it stumbles with a number of the data visualizations that don’t match the data.  Accuracy is the most important aspect of infographic design, because when you mess up visualizing the data your overall design loses credibility.

The circular bar chart in the first section has text values of 64%, but the visualization is showing a value close to 85%.  In the Ad Spending grid of 100 Circles, the data shown in text is 20%, but only 8% is colored red in the data visualization.  In the final Mobile Ad Spending circular bar chart at the end of the infographic, I can’t see any correlation between the numbers and the chart.

Found on imediaconnections.com!

Your Dirty Habits Make Me Sick

We all have our habits, but some of these dirty habits may come to a shock to you. Your Dirty Habits Make Me Sick infographic from ionSwipes educates the reader on how their morning routines and work day can be full of nasty habits that will get them sick.

The isometric illustrations of the places we live and work are great, and draw in the readers.  By seeing these common places we all interact with, it makes the information and data more personal and relevant to the audience.  

However, none of the data is visualized.  Big fonts are not data visualizations, and relies on the audience to read all of the text contained in each callout.  Visualizations of the data would have communicated the information faster, attracted the reader’s attention and put it into context for the readers.

Thanks to Ashley for sending in the link!

How Far is it to Mars?

How Far is it to Mars? by David Paliwoda is a fantastic animated, interactive infographic website that shows the viewer the scale of the distance to the Moon and to Mars as measured in pixels.  David calls this a motion-infographic.

Click the image above to see the animated site.  Very cool! 

Found on Daring Fireball

Social Network Overload

How often have you checked your social media accounts today? Feeling unplugged is a problem for many people.  Social Network Overload from mylife.com talks about how people are addicted to social media, and what they rather do than give up their Internet lifeline. 

Afraid you’re missing something important on your email, Facebook, Twitter, or other accounts? You are not alone. Two out of three people feel the same way. In the same survey, three out of five people wished there was a solution to monitor their various communication options.

Here’s an interesting infographic based on a survey by Harris which illustrates a growing trend—social media overload

The isometric illustrations of people and the data visualizations are fun, and the light-hearted data makes this one appealing to share.  The design is missing the URL to the infographic landing page, so that readers can find the original when they see thie infographic posted on other sites.

Found on The Undercover Recruiter and Visual Loop.

Wine Pairing - Inspired Infographic Advertising

How to Pair Wine with the Bright, Bold flavors of Southeast Asia is a new infographic from P.F. Changs’s, an upscale restaurant chain, as part of the content in their “Inspired” advertising campaign.

The flavors of Southeast Asia cuisine are exploding in popularity.  Venture below to learn about the region’s most delicious ingredients and the dishes they can create.  Find out how to pair each dish with the perfect wine to enhance those flavors.

I love seeing an infographic design being used in this fashion, as part of a larger content marketing strategy.  The larger advertising campaign also includes specifically, interactive PDFs and a dedicated page on their site to entire program.

Although wine pairing infographics are not new, P.F.Chang’s made this custom to coincide with their own menu.  So this design is meant to help diners match wine types specifically to items on the menu at P.F. Chang’s.  The color coding ties the ingredients in to the different dishes and types of wine.

Thanks to Anne for sending in the link!

Asteroids!

Simon Scarr is doing some great work as the Graphics Director at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.  Last month he designed Close Encounters, the full-page visualization of the Near-Earth-Objects that have passed within the Moon’s orbit (or will pass by) from 1910-2189.

A 45-metre-wide asteroid came remarkably close to Earth on Friday, even closer than communication and weather satellites. It was be the nearest known close miss for an object of its size.   

When this story was first mentioned in the newsroom, a few days before the incident, it sparked debate. People were intrigued as to how close these objects come to Earth. How many pass by? And how fast or large are they? A perfect opportunity for an interesting graphic.    

As usual, NASA had every piece of information we needed. Their Near-Earth Object Program was established in 1998 to help coordinate, and provide a focal point for the study of comets and asteroids that can approach the Earth’s orbit. They have data sets on all close approaches to Earth since 1900 and projected forward to 2200.    

This is a beautiful design that shows the distances to scale by placing them in between the Earth and the Moon, and the horizontal lines show the relative speeds of all the objects.  Orange lines are future, predicted passes.

Simon has posted more behind the scenes information about putting this infographic design together on his own blog.  I highly recommend the post, and you can check out his other work.

Found on Visual Loop.

What Works in Rich Media Mobile Advertising?

Celtra’s What Works in Rich Media Mobile Advertising? infographic provides marketers with a baseline for ad performance, helping them plan successful and effective mobile campaigns.

Celtra Inc, the industry leader for rich media advertising and analytics across mobile devices, has today unveiled a new infographic that highlights front-line advertising industry trends from the company’s first quarterly Mobile Rich Media Monitor Report.

The data behind the infographic indicates that a well designed rich media experience that uses a store locator, games or social media has a direct and positive impact on consumer engagement and return on investment. In fact, rich media mobile advertisements drive double-digit engagement rates (12.8 percent on average) across all devices types, platforms and ad placements.

Celtra’s infographic hones in on several key metrics including engagement rate, expand rate and click-through rate. The data also provides an in-depth look at ad feature performance for mobile rich media campaigns.

This design is the first in a quarterly series planned by Celtra to be released with their quarterly Rich Media Monitor Report.  Each one will highlight a different insight from the information that Celtra publishes in the report.

It’s a clear design that walks the reader through the data and the conclusions step-by-step.  There’s a lot of data included, but the data visualizations are easy to understand.

Thanks to Caitlin for sending in the link!

The Water Rich vs The Water Poor

The USA is lucky to be in the top 5 countries that have annual renewable water resources. Because of this, we are very wasteful. This is considered to be “Water Rich”.  For the countires that are considered Water Poor, they do not have the wasteful luxury, in fact 88% of fatal cases are due to inadequate water access. The Water Rich vs Water Poor infographic by seametrics.com tells the story of both water rich countries and water poor countries.

While some might say gold or diamonds, as far as human life goes, water is the world’s most precious commodity.  As the world population increases, and industry continues to expand, Earth’s freshwater reserves are being stretched dangerously thin.  See the disparity in water consumption between wealthy and underdeveloped nations.

This is a good side-by-side comparison design, that has a lot of information.  Maybe too much information, because it can be overwhelming to readers.

Thanks to Ngoc for sending in the link!

Side note: There are only 5 DAYS LEFT to participate in the Cool Infographics Start 2013 Clean charity drive!  If you are able, please visit our campaign on Charity:Water and donate to the cause of providing clear, drinkable water to everyone that needs it.

460 Million Connected Internet Devices

Beautiful data visualizations of some very scary data!  

An anonymous hacker under the pseudonym of “Carna Botnet” has posted a comprehensive Internet Census 2012 report of over 460 million internet connected devices that responded to PING requests or were found to have open ports.  He was able to create a botnet using over 30,000 Internet devices that had remote administration available using the Telenet and still had the factory installed standard passwords.  He found several hundred thousand open devices, but didn’t need that many.

Abstract: While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage. 

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study. 

The visualizations he was able to create using the gathered data are fantastic.  Check out the IMAGES page of the report for beautiful, high-resolution images.

The map visualization above shows the geolocation data of all 460 million devices that responded to the queries from the botnet, clustered around population centers as you might expect.  The animated GIF below shows the geolocated devices that responded during the course of a day, showing that many devices are turned off overnight but many more are just left on constantly.

My favorite visualization from the data is the Hilbert Map, which uses the a 2-dimensional Hilbert Curve to map out the continuous sequence of IP4 addresses into a square area, and then color-codes the address blocks that responded to a PING request.  There’s even a cool zoomable viewer of the Hilbert Map that lets you drill into the details.

This form of mapping was inspired by the xkcd Map of the Internet, which shows the Internet addresses that were distributed to major corporations in the 1990s before the Regional Internet Registries took over the allocation.

Found on the Security Now podcast #396 and FlowingData