Blood Simple: Designing Infographic Health Reports

Blood Simple, by Steven Leckart, is a great article in the recent issue (Dec 2010) of WIRED magazine, and is also available to read online.  Three visual designers were challenged to design a better lab report to help make health information more approachable and understandable by patients.

…lab reports don’t have to be unintelligible. With some thought and design-minded thinking, tests can be as informative to patients as they are to physicians. With a little context and color, we can make sense of the numbers. And with a bit more understanding, patients can become participants in their own health.

These designs certainly aren’t perfect, but they very clearly illustrate the point that we should be able to help patients get a better grip around their own health information.  The last few decades have seen a tremendous shift in pushing the responsibility of a patient’s health back onto the patient without giving them a better way to understand the information. 

We consulted with Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, physicians at the Dartmouth Medical School Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and experts in communicating data to patients, to make sure the right information gets onto the forms and the irrelevant stuff stays off. And we tapped three exceptional designers to reimagine how this information can be presented—limiting them to one printed page per report. Consider these a proof of concept, a refutation of the argument that ordinary people can’t handle their health (and inspiration, we hope, for the medical establishment).

I want my own Visual Health Report!

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.

WHAT?!? The Hearing Loss infographic

You Want to Lose Your Ears? is a cool infographic designed by Big Oak about common (and uncommon) sounds and their potential risk to your hearing.  I love the spiral visual as the sound examples get louder.  

Here we have a graphic that brilliantly displays the effects of hearing loss and how to cope with it. The graphic points out that the four main ways people lose their ears are through listening to loud music, spending too much time in an industrial work place with power drills and the like, being exposed to the sounds of a racetrack, and being exposed to the sounds of guns firing for long periods of time. So, how do you know if your ears are being damaged? Well, if someone is standing three feet away from you, but you cannot hear the words coming out of their mouth, then odds are that you are probably in a situation where the noise level is dangerous.

Hopefully, a grenade isn’t a common experience for any of us, but if it is, let’s hope hearing loss is the worst of your worries!

Infographic Design by Big Oak for The Ear Plug Superstore & Audilio.com (Protection Auditive)

Found on InfographicsShowcase.com

Client Infographic: The 2011 SAP Salary Survey

The 2011 SAP Salary Survey is a new (tall) infographic InfoNewt (my company) designed for Panaya, a software-as-a-service company that provides upgrade automation to SAP customers.  The team at Panaya runs this survey annually to gather information about SAP professionals, and shares it publicly as a source of valuable information to current and future clients.

In 2011, the number of participants more than doubled to over 800. So, while as an online survey it should be taken with a grain of salt, we believe it is more representative of current realities. We tried to focus on issues that are of interest to the global SAP community versus regional issues.

For example:

• Are Europeans earning more than Americans? (Hint: No)
• Is there gender bias among SAP professionals?
• Is there a correlation between education and pay level?
• What are the top paying jobs?
• What is the outlook for 2011?

You can read the detailed report here.

The infographic is only a top-level summary of the detailed report, and gives Panaya a great way to build awareness and share the survey results broadly with the online community.

Thanks to Udi and the rest of the team at Panaya!  There’s much more information available at Panayainc.com and ERP Executive: The Magazine for SAP Managers.

The 2011 Massachusetts Budget infographic poster

Jess Bachman, from ByJess.net,  has designed this new government budget poster of the 2011 Massachusetts Budget for The Pioneer Institute.

The most largest and most detailed visualization of a state budget ever, this 864 sq in poster (not for sale) compares hundreds of programs and expenditures from the billions down to the thousands of dollars.  If you really want to see how a state (like Massachusetts) spends it’s tax payers money, this is it.

The above graphic is a massive visual guide to the Massachsettes state budget. It presents hundreds of government departments, agencies, and programs in a visual format, proportionate in size to their funding level. The largest item is $15 billion, the smallest is $65 thousand.

Similar to his Death & Taxes poster of the Federal budget, the Massachusetts Budget poster is highly detailed, showing how spending for every department is broken down.

Although it’s not clear if The Pioneer Institute will make posters available for purchase, you can see the full detail online in this high-definition zoomable image.  (Check it out full-screen too!)

The Visual History of the Political Parties (infographic posters)

Timeplots.com has just released two new posters visualizing the history of the two major American political parties.  Zoomable images of both A Visual History of the Democratic Party and A Visual History of the Republican Party are available so you can see all of the detail online.  

Timeplots is also offering a discount to readers of Cool Infographics!  Enter the Coupon Code “CIG020311” to receive 10% off until 3/31/11!

Just like the other great posters from Timeplots.com, these are highly-detailed posters, loaded with a huge amount of data.  At its heart, they are timelines that show the overall party strength from 1832 (Democrats) or 1856 (Republicans) to the present.  Along the timeline additional information is included like the names of the national party chairs, Congressional leaders, city where the party convention was held, who were the winning and losing party nominees for President (along with campaign material), election highlights, party events, major legislation, as well as pictures of other party notables.

You get the point that there is a lot of history in there!

It places each party event in historical context, visualizing a remarkable range of party events, legislation, election results, and leadership to succinctly tell the story of the party. Narratives are displayed within the larger context of party strength by aggregating and annotating data on presidential elections, Congress, Governorships and State Legislatures. The Timeplot provides a new lens into American political history; it is not intended to be absorbed at a glance, but rather to be visited and revisited over time.

Posters are 36” x 24” and normal price without the discount is $29.95.

Posters should start shipping by 2/28.  Also, check the Timeplots.com site for student discounts on any of their posters.

The (visual) Anatomy of an Apple Email

You know how unique Apple emails are when they show up in your Inbox.  The Anatomy of an Apple Email, from Flowtown, does a great job of visually explaining the layout and elements in an infographic with the look and feel of an Apple email.

The emails sent by Apple to consumers are riddled with trademark characteristics, including multiple ‘Calls To Action,’ as well as the beloved ‘Hero Shot.’ Here is a breakdown of each of these characteristics and a summary of their general purpose.

Found on Social Media Graphics

Hop On, Hop Off The Jefferson Airplane

Hop On, Hop Off The Jefferson Airplane is a visual history of the band Jefferson Airplane by Italian infographic artisan Gino Selva.  The colored lines show which performers were involved in each album and which instrument they played.  A guide on the left side shows which band name was used for the different albums.

It’s fairly complicated, but that’s the reality of the band’s history and why needs an infographic to help simplify it.

Nice job Gino!

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!

The Illusion of Diversity: Visualizing the Soft Drink Industry

Very cool visualization from Philip H. Howard at Michigan State University called The Illusion of Diversity.  It’s fairly big and hard to read, so I dropped the image link into Zoom.it to create the zoomable image above.  You can see the high-resolution image here, or download the high-resolution PDF here.

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.

Found on Infosthetics.com and VizWolrd.com