The History of Prime Time Television

The History of Prime Time Television is a new infographic poster from HistoryShots co-founder and designer Larry Gormley.  Covering 70+ years of television history, the timeline plots out the most important/popular/trendsetting shows grouped by genre.

This graphic charts the history of prime time television from the origins of the industry in 1940s to the present day. More than 550 of the most important, popular, and trendsetting television shows are mapped into more than 20 genres. Shows selected have won critical acclaim according to recognized television critics or have wide audience appeal based on Nielsen ratings and awards won. The number of years each show has been aired is mapped allowing you to quickly see how long each show lasted.

This graphic was created by Larry Gormley. Reebee Garofalo’s Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music was a key inspiration for the design.

Compared to prior designs, it looks like this new project presented the additional challenge of visualizing multi-year television series, which were addressed with extended dotted lines showing the date range for each television show.

The design is available for purchase as a 41”x20” poster for $39.00 from the HistoryShots site.

The Social Grammys

I missed posting this before the actual Grammys, but I really like the design.  The Social Grammys from Activ8Social looks at the online stats of the biggest names in music.

What is the only thing that could be more exciting than this year’s Grammy Awards? An infographic about the Grammy Awards, of course! Before we see them rock the red carpet, we wanted to see how the biggest names in music size up against each other in terms of their social reach.

To find out who would win the “Social Grammys,” we analyzed the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts of the nominees for the Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Album of the Year. There’s no question that the nominees all have a substantial and influential online presence but some are shockingly stronger in some areas than others. One surprising statistic is “Thinking About You” artist, Frank Ocean, has over 1 million more followers on Twitter than he has fans on Facebook. Another interesting statistic is the fact that only 42% of the nominees have Instagram accounts.

I thought the photos of the artists shown through the grids of squares representing the number of YouTube subscribers was really clever and well done.  

The History of Doctor Who Companions

The History of Doctor Who Companions infographic from mirror.co.uk gives us a guide to all the companions that Doctor Who has travelled with and a sneak peak on the newest one.  Along with the names and photos come statistics of gender, species, and who is the worst and the best companions.

It’s goodbye Amy Pond after Karen Gillan left in a tear-jerking mid-season finale, The Angels Take Manhattan. You can read our review here.

But how will Amy be remembered in the pantheon of best and worst Doctor Who companions? Did she hit the lofty heights of a Rose Tyler or a Leela? Or sink to the lowly lows of Ace and - Time Lords preserve us - Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush?

Take a look at the amazing infographic below and make up your own minds while learning all there is to know about the Doctor’s Tardis co-travelers…

I’m generally opposed to using photos in an infographic design because their full-color nature add a lot of visual complexity to a design.  In this case, photos work better than illustrations by making the different characters easily recognizable.

Thanks to Chris for sending in the link!

Star Trek: The Original Series

The Star Trek infographic designed by Natalya Platonova was originally designed in Russian for Svinovik.ru. This infographic is a visual overview of some quirky statistics from the complete original series (three seasons).

Overall, very well done!  As a Trekkie myself, the visualizations are fun facts about the series, and well designed.  I like that the quantitative values (like the uniforms worn) are shown as the actual numbers and not scaled. 

A couple of framing pieces of information would have been helpful.  The original design is published along with a text article, but some introductory text in the infographic itself would be nice because the image file gets shared without any of the text from the article.  The fotter should include some type of copyright or Creative Commons license and the URL for readers to be able to find the original, full-size versions.

Here’s the original version in Russian:

Found on Visual Loop!

Sheldon's T-Shirts of The Big Bang Theory

If you have seen the comedy show The Big Bang Theory, then you know Sheldon…. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it and get back to us.  Have you ever noticed his wardrobe?  The Sheldon’s T-Shirts infographic from fibers.com tells you his favorite shirts, how often he wears his shirts, and even what colors he wears the most! 

Graphs, Charts and illustrated T-Shirts with correlating sizes to wearing frequency - would there be any other way to visualize Sheldon Cooper’s t-shirt collection from The Big Bang Theory? We think not.

Big thanks to Sheldon’s Shirts where we got most of the data for this graphic. You can find a lot of Sheldon’s Shirts for purchase on the following websites:

• http://www.tvstoreonline.com
• http://www.projectshirt.com
• http://www.80stees.com
• https://www.heavytees.com

This is just a fun infographic that uses some data visualization to appeal to fans of the show.  Good design using publicly available data that has been complied in an engaging way.

The charts actually very well done.  Charts are color-coded to match the data.  Icons are included on the bars or in the pie slices, so no chart legends are needed.  This makes the data faster and easier to understand.

Found on Fibers.com

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!

Anatomy of a Television Commercial

Commercials, we don’t like them but we still have to watch them. (Except for superbowl commercials, those are funny!)  However, they are expensive to make and a lot of thought goes into them. The Anatomy of a Television Commercial by Voices.com explains what it takes to be a commercial worth it’s costs to make.

Learn about how to create a compelling TV ad in this visually appealing infographic. See key developments in the television ad industry and who the key players are. Learn how to write a script, what a good script length is and how to choose the right voice talent for a TV commercial.

This design does a good job leading the reader through a story top-to-bottom.  The use of the TV illustrations as frames for the different data visualizations consistently reinforces the television-related topic without text.

Where they messed up the visualizations is in the Television Commercial Durations section.  At first, I couldn’t understand why the visuals all looked wrong, but I finally realized they made a full circle equivalent to 100 seconds, instead of the standard 60 seconds used on EVERYONE’S clocks all over the world!  The 60-second visual should be a full circle, and not the 2/3 shaded circle shown.  Big visualization mistake!  Don’t confuse your audience.

I find it interesting that ad spending and television ad portion of advertising budgets continue to rise even with some many new ways to more effectively advertise online.  If there are any advertisers reading this post, may I point your attention to the Advertise page for Cool Infographics…

Thanks to Ashley for sending in the link!

The Timeline of Doctor Who

A highly detailed historical Timeline of Doctor Who from Cabletv.com!

Check out this complete timeline of Doctor Who from 1963 to present, including episodes, seasons, companions, villains, and more. Scroll down to follow all the Doctor’s adventures through time. A Fantastic resource for any Doctor Who fan.

First and formost it’s a timeline of the Doctor Who episodes from 1963-2011.  I’ve posted earlier Doctor Who related infograpics here before (The Doctor Who infographic), but none that contained this level of detail.  From left-to-right you have seasons, episodes, which Doctor, which companions, key villains and additional facts.  When you view the timeline on the original page, the episode titles are also listed on the left side and aligned with the infographic.

There are a couple design changes I would propose that would have made the data easier to understand.  One of the things I love is that there is no legend, or any need for one.  All of the descriptions for the color-coding and data visualizations is included in the visual designs.  However, some of the color-coding is inconsistent.  The color for Rose Tyler as the first of the modern companions is green in the timeline, but then additional facts about Rose are colored blue in the last column.  This is also true about the character of the The Master, and other companions, where a consistent color-coding would have made the connections easier for the reader to understand.

Thanks to James for sending in the link!

HBO Recycling Program

The HBO Recycling Program is a visualization by Craig Robinson that shows many of the actors and actresses that HBO has used in multiple series.  This was posted as part of an article on Grantland.com.

Actors who have appeared in three or more episodes of multiple scripted, live-action, original, HBO series since OZ (excluding miniseries).

Inspired by the original visualization, an interactive version was created by Zack Grossbart that allows you to highlight either the show, or the actor, and it will display the connections.

Click on two shows, and the interactive version will highlight only those actors in both shows.

Zack’s interactive infographic is made with PaperJS, underscore.js, and a little JQuery.  He has made the code open source, and it can be used to display the connections between other groups as well, if anyone has the motivation to map their own connections. 

18 Things You Didn't Know About Firefly

You can’t stop the signal…

As a Browncoat, I had to post this new infographic: 18 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefly from CarSort.com.

Firefly has quickly become a cult classic, after it was cancelled by Fox in 2002, after airing only 11 episodes (out of order). Firefly was created by Joss Whedon who is best known for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer and is set to direct and write The Avengers movie set for release in the summer of 2012. Firefly is a space western set in the 25th century where the renegade crew of the Serenity try to stay one step ahead of the long arm of the Alliance.

CarSort.com has put together a fun infographic with little known facts about Firefly and Serenity.

• Did you know that Neil Patrick Harris was turned down for the role of Simon
• Some people believe that Firefly was a rip off of an amine series called Outlaw Star
• Some of the sets were recycled from Power Rangers
• Zac Efron made his TV debut on Firefly…

Certainly not the best infographic design I’ve ever seen

• WAY too much text!  This is really a text list with some images.
• No data visulizations for the body counts
• Should have included a visual size comparison of Serenity to the ISS or the Battlestar Galactica when either of them was mentioned
• No data sources listed.  Where did these facts come from?  Are they really true?
• No license listed on the infographic (Copyright or Creative Commons)?

But the infomation is cool, and I learned a few things I didn’t know.  Joss, you can hit that red button any day now…

Thanks to Brenden for sending in the link!