Visualizing Daily Activities With Media Wheel

I really like the Media Wheel for Visualizing Daily Activities from Hill Holiday.  The wheel visualizes how people consumer different types of media over the course of a day.  For example, DVD/Video is mostly consumed in the evening and Newspaper is mostly consumed in the morning.  each slice is a different type of media, and the consumption levels are shown by how bright the colors are at that time of day.

For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this “media wheel” chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet.  

Read their blog post, they included a good description of how they normalized the data and created the media wheel.  They also gave credit to the designer, Eric Fensternheim, which is always nice to see.

The wheel graph itself was built by hand in Adobe Illustrator. Each data point’s value relative to the highest in its row is tied to the corresponding level of color transparency.

Design: Eric Fensterheim, media design intern.

The Doctor Who Infographic

Very cool overview Infographic History of Doctor Who, with some fantastic illustrations, by Bob Canada (@bob_canada on Twitter).  The world of Doctor Who is incredibly complex, but this infographic gives new viewers the basics.

Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the Doctor, but were afraid to ask. Click here to see a super-sized version so you can better read the text.

This piece took quite a while to finish. I worked on it a little at a time over several days. There was a lot of moving around of elements and a lot of text editing to get everything to fit in an efficient manner. Hopefully there aren’t any glaring errors in the information.

Laid out entirely in InDesign. All the Doctors, the Sonics and the TARDIS were drawn in InDesign as well.

You can tell from the illustrations that the hair was iconic for each Doctor.  You could probably identify each doctor in silhouette by the hair alone!