Iconography of Ink

Iconography of Ink, created by Stylight.com, maps out 90 celebrity tattoos and their connections to one another. You can find other interesting facts and tips about tattoos at Stylight.com.

Tattoos—originating from the Tahitian word ‘tatau’—have decorated the skins of endless cultures, spanning thousands of years. Both Polynesian tribes and Italian monks donned such skin art, not to mention, world-traveling sailors and European monarchs.

Fast-forward to today and tattoos are common practice amongst all socioeconomic classes. Scan PopSugar, Huffington Post or Vogue magazine and you’re sure to find tattooed musicians, actors and models alike. The celebrity tattoo craze isn’t just a sign of the times, but an entertaining melodrama.

From bad ass Cambodian tigers (read: Angelina Jolie) to ill-advised dedications to spouses (we’re looking at you Melanie Griffith), watching the evolution of Hollywood tattoos rivals even the most absorbing of reality tv shows.

Thanks to Elisa for sending in the link!

Sleeping Habits of the Rich & Famous

Even though we are all told that the recommended amount of sleep is 8 hours, everyone seems to function differently on the same amounts of sleep. The Sleeping Habits of the Rich & Famous infographic from Big Brand Beds introduces the sleep cycles of famous and successful people. I guess one sleep cycle doesn’t fit all!

We’re always told about getting a regular, solid eight hours’ sleep when it comes to being productive and successful, but not everyone follows this seemingly sound advice. Some of the most famous, successful and driven people throughout history have had some very strange sleeping habits - from micro-kips to sleeping in phases. We’ve got the oddest rich and famous sleeping habits in this new infographic.

There’s no way I could work with the staggered sleep patterns of Thomas Edison or Leonardo Da Vinci.

I like this design with simple time scales to show the sleep patterns and the series of circles to show the total number of hours per day. The visualization is repeated for each person, so once you understand the first one, you can easily understand the rest.

The design should have included the URL directly to the infographic landing page in the footer so readers can easily find the original, full-size version when they see the infographic on another site. Since they used a blog post as the infographic landing page, it will get shuffled down the blog page quickly as they post additional content. Don’t make your readers hunt for your infographic, or they will just give up and move on.

Thanks to Dave for sending in the link!

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.