Data Visualization, Infographic Design, Visual Thinking, Product Development and Marketing professional fascinated by good infographics. Always looking for better ways to get the point across.
Infographic showing the acquisitions and investments of Microsoft, done as a tube map with each coloured line representing a different industry for each acquisition or investment. Where the stations meet is where the two industries overlap. The key at the bottom displays information about the location on the map of the station (company) the year of acquisition or investment.
This thing is big! Poster-sized big. I dropped the link into Zoom.it so it would be easier for you to zoom in closer and see the details.
The Map of the Internet is an ambitious project from Peer 1 Hosting that maps the network of hosts and routing connections that are the foundation of the Internet. Clicking on the image above takes you to the poster in an interactive zooming viewer so you can see the details. You can also read about the making of the poster in this post on the Peer 1 Hosting blog.
It’s a layout of all the networks that are interconnected to form the internet. Some are run by small and large ISPs, university networks, and customer networks - such as Facebook and Google. It’s visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections.
In technical speak, you’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighbouring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems is based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central.
My apologies for being late posting this one here on the blog. They were giving out free printed 24”x36” posters at SxSW in Austin, TX a couple weeks ago, but the high-resolution PDF is available from the Peer 1 Hosting site.
Thanks to Shobhita for sending me the information and the link!
Came across this great family tree/decision tree to help you identify the different kinds of pasta from CharmingItaly.com. What Kind of Pasta is on Your Plate? breaks the pasta types down into shape families and uses some nice visuals to help you identify your pasta.
I’m an avid reader of Coolinfographics.com - some of the infographics you mentioned on your blog inspired me to create one for our blog as well. Unlike the usual chart- and fact filled graphics, we decided to create a somewhat educational infographic. It highlights the most common and/ or popular types of pasta, and helps you to identify the type of pasta on your plate.
I wish they would hang this up in the pasta aisle in the grocery store!
The new LinkedIN Maps is a very cool interactive infographic that visualizes your own LinkedIN network. The InMaps pull data from your own LinkedIN profile when you allow access, so you can only see your own network.
The connections are grouped into clusters based on shared connections and companies. You can see above that my network has a few clearly defined clusters, but then a large blue area that has no clear cluster information. You can also learn about you network with some of the visual data built into the map. People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections.
It’s interactive, so you can zoom in to see the individual names, and if you click on a connection, it highlights all of their connections as well.
Check out the quick, descriptive video from LinkedIn’s chief scientist DJ Patil:
For some reason, it doesn’t show every connection between people. There are a few people in my network that I know are also connected to each other; however, the map didn’t show any connection between them. Not sure what’s going behind the scenes.
You can publicly share your map on Twitter, Facebook and of course LinkedIN when you click the share buttons. Here’s mine. This creates a static image with a legend if you have named your color-coded clusters. Clicking on the map takes readers to the front page to create their own, but clicking on your name takes them to your LinkedIN profile page.
You can also see some other anonymous maps on the front page by clicking on the “Next Map” button which will change to the background map image.
Background Three firms control 89% of US soft drink sales [1]. This dominance is obscured from us by the appearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves. Steve Hannaford refers to this as “pseudovariety,” or the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice [2]. To visualize the extent of pseudovariety in this industry we developed a cluster diagram to represent the number of soft drink brands and varieties found in the refrigerator cases of 94 Michigan retailers, along with their ownership and/or licensing connections.
Professor Howard’s team did a lot of legwork visiting stores to gather the data, recording 987 different varieties of soft drinks from 94 food retailers in the Lansing, Michigan area.
The statement “Three firms control 89% of US soft drink sales” really means that “89% of the drinks available come from only three firms”. The distinction is subtle, but there is no sales data included. This is just an ownership structure.
You also have pay attention to what you’re seeing. The bubble sizes are mixed because the parent company bubbles are sized to the portion of drinks they control, but the size of the individual drink bubbles is consistent and doesn’t convey any meaning. For the individual drink, the color-coding is what conveys meaning.
Conclusion The illusion of diversity in the soft drink industry extends beyond obscuring ownership, as its products are primarily water and sweeteners. More research is needed on the links between pseudovariety and the consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor substances.
I noticed that this was created using OmniGraffle, which is a vector mapping application that I use a lot.
As a reader, you really need to look closely, and appreciate the level of detail and connections included in this design. The overall message is that the dark side of Capitalism “can” lead to Misery, and the branches explore different aspects of business and personal life influences.
Lazar provided some behind-the-scenes information behind the making of The Ride of Your Life:
“The whole thing was inspired by two books that I would strongly recommend to any communications professional: Robert Cialdini’s ‘Influence: the psychology of persuasion’ and Oliver James’s ‘Afluenza’. Cialdini is a world renowned academic in social psychology applied to persuasion, while James is a psychologist dedicated to investigating the origins of what we also know as the ‘status syndrome’.
I was intrigued by the fact that people in liberal capitalist societies tend to feel less happy than in many others with significantly (sometimes shockingly) less wealth. Which made me think of the role of persuasion industries in that phenomenon.
I did the original drawing in one short but frantic session on the inner back cover of Cialdini’s book, but the initial structure has evolved over the last few months, to the one that you see here. The original title was ‘The architecture of misery’ but then I realised that I need a visual partner who will bring it to life. Enter Vladan Srdic, my friend and an incredibly gifted designer from Slovenia, and the ‘spiritus movens’ behind the design Studio 360 in Ljubljana. He not just brought the structure to life by replacing my pitiful clouds with the stylish metro map but also changed its title into ‘Ride of your life’ - which I infinitely preferred.”
Lazar was also gracious enough to share one of his early drafts so Cool infographics readers could see how far the final infographic had evolved from the initial idea.
Fantastic job Lazar for going through the whole process and making your thoughts become a reality. I want to see the next version exploring the good side of Capitalism!
We don’t technically need coffee to survive (though many would argue just the opposite), yet this popular pick-me-up fuels not only our daily energy levels, but the global economy as well. The coffee industry thrives in countries like Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia: the world’s leading coffee exporters. Meanwhile, coffee drinkers around the world love their daily morning brew like no other drink. In the United States alone, we consume more than 66 billion cups of coffee per year. Some of us love our java so much, in fact, that we even observe a national coffee holiday, September 29.
There are a handful of statistics included that aren’t visualized, which does seem odd. For example, “40% of this coffee is now gourmet” could easily have been visualized.
I really like Snoozing With Ghosts & Ghouls: A guide to America’s most haunted hotels from TravelPost.com. It’s light on visualizing data, but I like both the content and the easy-to-read graphic. The locations are the only thing actually visualized, but they could also have done visuals for the Guest Ratings.
Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health. This updated map uses sizes to represent total social activity in a community - that is, how much talking, playing, sharing or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.
Ever wondered how to own your own private island? With many of major cruise lines now owning their own white sandy beaches in the Caribbean here is a look into how we can own our own paradise too.
Randy
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