Smoothie Recipes For Everything

Who knew that the solution to most our problems could be solved with a smoothie?! Smoothie Recipes For Everything infographic from Super Skinny Me gives you the ingredients and visually represents the amount of each that should put in. Trying to lose weight? Want to de-stress? Or maybe just want a bedtime drink. This infographic has it all.

Is there anything as versatile, adaptable and convenient as a smoothie? I doubt it. Nor are there many things as universally beloved.  Smoothies are scrumptious, indulgent concoctions that tickle the taste buds and, inexplicably, with every sip make you feel just a little bit happier and make the world a little bit friendlier. The smoothie is so much greater than the sum of it’s parts. And just to prove the smoothie can do no wrong, it can actually make you more awesome too.

Smoothies contain a smorgasbord of ingredients, and depending on what you throw in, smoothies can ascend from mere flavorsome delight and sweet-tooth satisfier to the dizzying heights of muscle-building, energizing, health-enhancing superdrink. Why eat just one superfood, when you can combine a load of goodness into one easily digestible drink? Plus, it’s super quick and absurdly easy to prepare, making it weirdly efficient not just nutritionally, but generally. Created in the 1940’s, but perfectly designed for 21^st century living.

Smoothies can be tailored to suit your own needs. And while the flavors are virtually limitless, don’t just think about taste, but also why you’re making it. Do you want to lose weight or perhaps build muscle? Do you need a pick-me up or extra energy to power through an intense workout? Had a bad day and want to wind down? Or maybe you can’t get to sleep. With a little smoothie science, you can easily make a smoothie that doesn’t just taste good (or look pretty), but actually does something.

The major issue I have with this design is that the proportions visualized for each smoothie aren’t accurate to the recipe.  The sections are sized to fit the text, and have no relationship to the data.  Big mistake!

Also, the actual amounts of each ingredient aren’t shown.  The recipes are on the infographic landing page in the text portion, but aren’t included in the infographic itself.  The issue with infographics is that they need to include the complete information because they are shared all by themselves, without any accompanying description text.

Found on superskinnyme.com

Sip Statistics 2012

A great way to wrap up the summer, the Sip Statistics infographic was a joint design project with Hotels.com, TGIFriday’s and InfoNewt (my company).

The Hotels.com® Sip StatisticsTM uses data from T.G.I. Friday’s to help travelers do as the locals do and follow their drink-clinations by identifying favorite drinks in popular cities. T.G.I. Friday’s has also provided cool new summer drink recipes below to keep that summer feeling going all year round. 

The design combines Hotels.com Average Daily Room Rate information from the top U.S. cities with the geographic popularity of TGIFriday’s top summer drinks in those same cities.  A fun, engaging way to share some internal information only available from these two companies.

The room rates are clearly compared in rank order with the bar graph linked to the map locations, and the most popular drinks are also shown in rank order for each city using both unique drink galss icons and color coding.  The icons and color coding are carried down the design to the recipe section, where the drink content proportions are shown with a pie chart visualization.

Thanks to the teams at both Hotels.com and TGIFriday’s!

Life of a Cask: Wine to Whiskey

 

Wow! Who knew that the Cask would be so valuable! It is a key ingredient to making our favorite wine and whiskeys! See how Scotch depends on Sherry in the infographic Life of a Cask: Wine to Whiskey from winefolly.com.

An infographic on the life of a cask, from wine to whiskey. Find out where casks start their life and see how Scotch is dependent on Sherry.

Cask Facts

• Used wine barrels are in high demand for Scotch and whisky production.
• Distilleries prefer Oloroso Sherry casks and other dessert wine casks such as Port and Sauternes for aging whisky.
• Sherry producers use larger casks called Hogheads (250 L) and Butts (500 L).
• Some distilleries own forests in America where they source quercus alba (white oak) to produce casks.
• Distilleries often loan unused casks to Sherry producers to ‘season’ them.

A Single malt Scotch cask ages 3-40+ years. A single cask may be used for up to 70 years

Nice visual explanation.  Easy to follow with a focused message that isn’t crowded with a bunch of additional factoids.  

The text is a little too small to read without zooming in closer, and there should be a URL at the bottom linking back to the original infographic landing page.  Otherwise, how can people find the original version they can read when a blog doesn’t link back correctly?

Just in time for the weekend too, it’s making my thirsty…

Thanks to Justin for sending in the link!

The Health Benefits of Guinness vs. Beer

The Health Benefits of Guinness vs. Beer is a new infographic from the team at GoIreland.com.  Primarily focused on calories, this infographic does a good job at visualizing comparisons.

We at GoIreland have rustled up a useful infographic about Guinness and other beers. But not just any infographic about booze. We recognize that folks in the 21^st century are more health conscious than ever, so have combined these two facets to look at the health benefits of Guinness vs. other types of beer.

Whether you enjoy the dark stuff, or lean towards lager, the results show that a pint of one, or the other, can have positive effects on various areas of the body, such as the heart, bones and even your skin. Through painstaking research, we even worked out how many individual peanuts each drink is the equivalent to eating, how long it would take to burn off those calories and taken a look at some of the strongest beers known to mankind.

This infographic is really well designed, and it’s focused on one of my favorite drinks in the world!  The visual comparison between Guinness and a handful of light beers is clear and easy to read.  However, when they start comparing to “Regular Beer” it’s unclear what brand they are using as the average beer and where that data comes from.  I like the Running and Dancing comparisons that are fun and make understanding the differences easier to an average reader.

The only visualization error I see is the circles on the world map.  Circles have to be sized by their AREA, so if we assume the Ireland circle is the correct baseline, then the circles for values of 0.06 and 0.02 would only be a couple pixels wide.  The circles in the design are shown larger than their actual values, which is a false visualization.

At the bottom, I wish there was a URL to the original landing page for readers to get back to the original, and some form of copyright statement.

Thanks to Oli for sending in the link!

Here is an alternate, shorter and in my opinion “better” version.  What do you think?

 

See Mix Drink: Infographic Cocktails

The See Mix Drink Cocktail Guide is a fabulous infographic drink recipe book from Brian D. Murphy (@murph_e).  Currently available for about $10 on Amazon.com, it’s on my wish list.  Featured on GQ.com back in October when it was released, I have been totally remiss by not posting about it until now.  (My apologies Brian!)

Have you tried mixing a Mojito? What about a Rusty Nail? Or a Cosmopolitan? With See Mix Drink, the first-ever cocktail book to offer instruction through info-graphics, making the drinks you love at home is as easy as, well, See, Mix, Drink.

This unique, illustrated guide graphically demonstrates how to make 100 of today’s most popular cocktails. For each drink, color-coded ingredients are displayed in a line drawing of the appropriate glassware, alongside a pie chart that spells out the drink’s composition by volume for intuitive mixing. No other cocktail book is this easy or fun. Instantly understandable 1-2-3 steps show exactly how each drink is prepared, and anecdotes, pronunciation guides, and photographs of the finished drinks will turn newbie bartenders into instant mixologists. 

The GQ.com feature has the designs for ten of the recipes from the book.  They are all simple to understand, and easy to follow.

One thing I would suggest to improve the visualization design style is to combine the key and the ingredient portions.  No need to make the reader look to both sides of the glass illustration to figure out how much of each ingredient.  Just putting the name with the amount on the left side and getting rid of the color key would eliminate an eye motion for the readers.

Thanks to Brian for sending in the link (back in October!) and congratulations on the publication!

The Definitive Cocktails Poster

The Constitution of Classic Cocktails is a cool new poster from Pop Chart Lab.  Available in print for $36, this is a 27”x39” poster.

This definitive guide to classic cocktails breaks down 68 drinks into their constituent parts. Follow the lines to see where spirits, mixers, and garnishes intersect to form delightful concoctions. This massive movie poster-sized print contains over 40 types of alcohol (from distilled spirits to bitters), mixers from raspberry syrup to egg white, and garnishes from the classic olive to a salted rim. This obsessively detailed chart also includes the ratios for each drink, as well as the proper serving glass, making it as functional as it is beautiful. Over a year in the making, this is Pop Chart Lab’s most elaborate chart ever.

I love the circular design, with radial connections between the different alcohol types in the center and the mixed drinks around the perimeter.  I find it easier to start in the center, and figure out which drinks you can make with that alcohol.  They show the different shapes of glassware for cocktails across the bottom, and use those icons to show which glass should be used with each drink.

Pop Chart Lab also posted a fabulous, behind-the-scenes article on FastCoDesign about the process they went through during the design development.  Check out The Only Chart You Need To Mix A Proper Cocktail to see the early concepts and the different stages the design went through.

Found on Chart Porn.

Christmas Drinks (alcoholic) from Around the Globe

Now here is a fun holiday infographic!  Direct from Kringle’s Bar at the North Pole is Christmas Drinks from Around the Globe, brought to us this holiday season by Treetopia.com.

Santa’s been throwing ’em back for a few centuries and has zipped around the world a thousand times, which has been plenty of time to pick up some wicked Christmas cocktail recipes. In this infographic from Treetopia are some of his favorite mixed drinks he’s collected from around the globe - complete with easy-to-follow mixing instructions. More than just your father’s traditional eggnog recipe!

Whether you have family coming to your house, or you’re going to visit family, you will probably have the opportunity to try one of these recipes out in the next couple of weeks.  Although, some of these recipes are a little more complicated than just mix & serve.

I love the color-coded pie charts to show the main ingredient proportions, especially the peppermint swirls in Candy Cane Eggnog.  The cocktail glass illustrations can be misleading though, since the eggnog recipe actually makes almost a gallon of nog.  What a fun idea for a Christmas infographic!

Thanks to Greg for sending in the link!

Please don’t drink and sleigh!

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 

Caffeine and Calories

Check out another great caffeine infographic, The Buzz vs. The Bulge, by David McCandless from Information Is Beautiful.  Another great spin on caffeine in drinks, this one plots caffeine content on the X-Axis, and calories on Y-Axis.

I love that there are also some foods mixed in with the drinks like a dark chocolate car, a butter croissant and coffee ice cream (brilliant).

When I started working on my Caffeine Poster, this hadn’t come out yet.  One the reasons I choose caffeine as the data to visualize for my project was because there weren’t any good visuals to be found at that time.  I definitely wanted to acknowledge David’s great work.

Making-Of The Caffeine Poster - Part 3

 

How did you pick which drinks to include?

The original spreadsheet with the caffeine calculations had about 100 drinks on it, but that made the image WAY too crowded.  Looking back, I could have made the images smaller to fit more drinks onto the poster, so maybe the next version will have more.

For the coffee side, I picked some of the most widely available coffee shops, and I also only picked one drink from each.  Starbucks alone had 20-30 different drinks I could have listed.

For the drinks side, I picked the drinks that were most widely available at the grocery stores in the DFW area.  It may be different regionally, but the local region was all I had to work with.

Dude, where’s the TEA?!?

I posted this in the comments, but I know I left tea out of the graphic (along with thousands of other drinks). It was actually hard to cull down the wide assortment of drinks down to only the ones I included. Not a tea drinker myself, tea didn’t make the cut (Kevin Rose would be disappointed, I know).  It’s very crowded in the under 100mg space, so tea didn’t make the cut.  Based on the feedback I got, I’ll include it if a next versions happens.

FWIW, tea averages between 40-70mg of caffeine in each 8oz cup

Can I buy a copy of The Caffeine Poster?

I haven’t setup the poster for sale, but I did keep the high-resolution images offline so I could make it available if there was interest.  The images on Flickr are certainly high-resolution enough to read the details, but they won’t print very nicely as a 24” x 36” poster.  So far, I haven’t heard from many people who wanted to buy a copy.

I also got some feedback that The Caffeine Poster makes a good infographic, but maybe not a great poster.  To be a great poster, it probably need more details and other additional information to make the viewer curious to step closer and read more.

However, I did have a few copies printed for myself…of course.

Will there be a next version?

Probably.  I’ve got some other projects in the works, so there’s no telling how long it will take.  You suggestions on what to change or add are very welcome.

The is the end of the Making-Of posts.  I got so many questions about the behind-the-scenes stuff that I moved all of The Caffeine Poster posts together on a separate page.  Check out the Caffeine Poster link at the top of the page.