20th Century Death

20th Century Death infographic from Information is Beautiful, visualizes the main causes of death during the 20th century by grouping each cause into general categories and then branching off more specifically.

Visualizing the major causes of death in the 20th Century.

Originally a 6m x 2m commission by the Wellcome Collection as a companion piece to the London exhibition: ‘Death: A Self-Portrait – The Richard Harris Collection’ (Nov 2012).

Appropriate choice of color scheme since red has a negative association like death, and red, orange, and yellow are an analogous color scheme due to their proximity on the color wheel. I would have loved to see more graphic pictures like the ones used in the infectious disease group and the animal subgroup.

I think this is a great application of a bubble chart. The audience isn’t trying to make specific value comparisons, but instead should get a general feel for the large differences in the causes of death.

I love that David McCandless and his team has made his data transparent and available to anyone. The data values are posted in a public Google Spreadsheet available at http://bit.ly/20thdeath

Found on Information is Beautiful

Comparing Hurricane Disasters: Sandy vs. Katrina

Comparing Disasters: Sandy vs. Katrina from The Huffington Post does a good job of clearly walking through the data to put the two mega-storm hurricanes into perspective.  Designed by Tim Wallace and Jaweed Kaleem, 

Over 100 people have died in the U.S. alone so far from Hurricane Sandy, and concerns are mounting that with hundreds of thousands still without power in frigid temperatures, the death toll will continue to climb. As the East Coast examines the destruction, comparisons have been made to other catastrophic storms.

Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, killed over 1,800 people and cost nearly $125 billion. Both storms were deadly, destructive and devastating to the thousands who lost their homes and livelihoods. View the infographic below to see how they compare by the numbers.

Editor’s note: This infographic has been updated to to reflect new and more comprehensive data on the number of people displaced or who will potentially be displaced by Hurricane Sandy-related damage, including people in shelters and people who are not in shelters but have had to leave their homes.

This infographic design does a great job using simple data visualizations to compare the two hurricanes with visual styles that are quick and easy for the reader to understand.  I’m especially impressed with the effective use of the grid of squares visualization method.  Although normally used in blocks of 100 to show percentages, they are stacked in this design to show quantitative comparisons.  They correctly kept each row to only 10 squares, which many designers get wrong.  Our number system is base-10, so it’s incredibly easy for us to understand visuals that are stack of 10 objects.

I also appreciate that they varied the visuals to appropriately match the type of data being shown.  So, circles to show diameter, map locations to show areas effected and stacked bars are all used along with the grid of squares method.

The overall design has a white background, with no border, so when shown on a webpage that also has a white background, it’s hard to see where the infographic stops.  I usually recommend some type of background color or frame to help the infographic stand out on its own.

At the bottom, a couple elements are missing.  A Copyright or Creative Commons claim, and the URL for readers to find the original, full-size version when they see the infographic shared on other sites.

Carbonite Small Business Disasters

Infographics as advertisments have a lot of potential.  In this one about Small Business Disasters, Carbonite.com has shared the results of research they performed with small businesses.

What would your small business do if your computers were stolen or destroyed? Would your important data still exist? In April, Carbonite surveyed small businesses with between two and 20 employees to study their disaster recovery and data backup methods. We found that almost half of small businesses have already lost irreplaceable data.

The design does suffer a little from the large-font-syndrome that tries to make the numbers really large instead of visualizing them, but there are a number of good, simple visualizations included in the infographic.

The design also seems like something is missing at the top.  No title, company logo or anything to indicated what this infographic is about.  That’s espeically important because infographics can be heavily shared and have a life of their own on the Internet, separate from any text or explanation that the origianl company posts along with it.

I will say that I LOVE Carbonite as a customer!