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!

Tea & Biscuit Dunking Guide

The Tea and Biscuit infographic from Green Hat Design in the UK shows avid dunkers of biscuits the proper timing to keep their favorite snacks in the tea or coffee to conquer floppage and avoid the disappointment of contamination!  Also available as a high-resolution PDF.

This biscuit infographic is based on 8 of our favourite UK brands which helps us (and others) to get the best out of his (or her) biccy when dunking it in hot tea or coffee, while at the same time assisting the user to avoid… floppage. That unfortunate moment that the biscuit suddenly gives way and contaminates your beverage. Nasty. We feel many could actually benefit from such details. I know it has changed my life.

This one is a fun topic.  Apparently the biscuits in the UK are so hard you have to dunk them to eat them…  :)

The radial design works well to show three values for each biscuit, and is easy for the reader to compare them.  The illustrations work well, even though readers in the U.S. (myself included) won’t recognize any of the biscuits.

A couple things are missing from a Marketing Infographic design perspective.  It needs a title!  I made up the “Tea & Biscuit Dunking Guide” because it didn’t have a good title of its own.  There should be some type of license statement, and in this case I would suggest Creative Commons.

The PDF file is hosted on the Green Hat Design site, but the infographic isn’t displayed anywhere.  t’sI hard to share a PDF compared to how easy it is to share an image file online.  It REALLY needs it’s own official landing page on the Green Hat Design site to display the infographic, and be the one place you want everyone else (like this blog) to link to.  They had uploaded it to visual.ly, and I linked to it there, but that shouldn’t be the primary landing page if they want to drive traffic to their site and awareness to their brand.

Thanks to Steve for sending in the infographic!

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.

The Anatomy of a Vegan

The Anatomy of a Vegan infographic from AdvancedPhysicalMedicine.org takes an “in depth” look at some of the demographic data they gathered in a survey of Vegans.

In spite of its long history, veganism is still considered unusual by many in this carnivore nation of ours.  But did you know there are 3 million+ vegans in the U.S.?  Yep, veganism has officially arrived.  So here are some facts about those who follow this lifestyle.

Designed by InfoMonkeys, I love the X-Ray design style.  They do a great job of showing context of the data being represented.  Hands with a wedding ring, the house, the shopping cart, the cityscape and the meat grinder is especially humorous.

Eye-popping colors and an X-ray theme give a whole new meaning to taking an “inside look” at veganism. Packed with information, this infographic strikes a great balance between education and entertainment. Based upon a Facebook survey with text provided by the client, this is one of our favorite pieces!

- InfoMonkeys

The black background stands out boldly in blog formats, and the infographic includes all the important information (clear title, data source, copyright, website URL and even lists the designer).  It should have listed the URL of the infographic on the Advanced Physical Medicine site instead of the homepage.  I like the idea of the “Importantometer”, but I just noticed the size of the arrows in the visualization doesn’t match the data.  The 17% arrow shouldn’t be larger than the 38% arrow, etc.

I have a few things I would suggest changing about the design:

• I say it often here on the blog.  Big fonts do not make good data visualizations.  Too many of the statistics are listed as big numbers without any visualization, and it would have been simple to visualize these statistics.
• The percentage sign under the value numbers on the bar charts are hard to read and disconcerting.  Shrink the numbers and lets the visualization tell the story.  The actual numbers themselves are secondary.
• The Annual Household Income is shown as a bar chart, but those percentages are all part of the complete 100%.  They should be shown as parts of the whole like a pie chart or a stacked bar chart.  Same with the shopping statistics.
• I have a really hard time reading the script font they used in the quoted responses at the bottom.

One final thought is that readers should always be skeptical of the data sources.  144 respondents from a Facebook survey is not enough to be a statistically valid study that would indicative of the entire population.  The reader also doesn’t know how the respondents were screened as part of the survey.  By visualizing the data in an infographic, it implies a certain level validity that isn’t truly there.

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

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 Infographic History of Spices

Turn Up the Heat: Worldwide History of Spice from recipe-finder.com brings together a whole bunch of related infomrmation into one infographic.

They say that money makes the world go round. While that might just be true today, centuries ago, spices made the world go round. Spices used to be worth so much that people set about to conquer new territories in search for these flavor enhancers. Today, basic spices may not fetch so much in the market (although saffron will still cost you an arm and two legs), but they are used just as much in kitchens around the world.

The information in here is fantastic, but a few design problems make this a little harder to understand than it should be.  The sized-circles over the map…what do the sizes mean?  From an overall design aspect, it’s missing a clear title, license and URL to the original posting.

I can eat jalapeno peppers in a lot of the food here in Texas, but anything over about 6,000 on the Scoville Scale is out of my league!

Thanks to @franky for sharing this on Twitter.

Who Owns The Beer Brands?

That beer you’re drinking from that cool independent brewery may not be what you think.  Another very cool data visualization from Philip H. Howard and Ginger Ogilvie at Michigan State University called Concentration in the US Beer Industry.  Similar to their last project visualizing the soft drink industry in The Illusion of Diversity, this new project shows the breweries and individual beers owned by the top 13 companies.

There is an appearance of great diversity in the number of brands and varieties of beer sold in the United States. The beer industry, however, is dominated by a relatively small number of firms.

AB InBev owns, co-owns or distributes more than 36 brands, for example, while MillerCoors controls at least 24 more. MillerCoors also brews Metropoulos & Company’s products under contract (thus the company that controls Pabst and 21 other brands is a “virtual” beer company).

Only meant to show which companies own which beer brands, the three bubble sizes are used to show parent companies, brewery brands and individual beer brands.  They designed a separate treemap visualization to show market share.

Because these are large visualizations, they have posted them within zooming viewers on the Michigan State University site.

Found on Flowing Data.

The Art and Science of S'mores

I love this cool infographic from REI, The Art and Science of S’mores. 

 A group of REI sweet tooths has put together what is perhaps the definitive infographic on s’mores. Check it out, and share it with your camping buddies. We’re betting The Art and Science of S’mores will make your next campground outing just that much more interesting.

This is a fantastic example of designing an infographic to be informative about a fun, interesting subject related to your brand.  Very shareable in social media channels, and it doesn’t feel like an REI ad.  You don’t have to be an outdoor enthusiast to enjoy the topic either, so the audience is a very wide array of people.  Even my 11 year old son loved it!

Found on Visual News.

Client Infographic: Making an Organic Choice

Making an Organic Choice from So Nice is a new infographic by InfoNewt and designer Jeremy Yingling.  This one tells the story in numbers of how organic food processing is better for you and the environment compared to conventional food processing.

We are what we eat, goes the old adage.

So Nice is committed to your health and that of the environment, which is why we use only certified organic, non-genetically modified organism (GMO) whole soybeans grown from environmentally responsible farming operations.  Below, we’ve contrasted only some of the data surrounding conventional and organic farming to help you learn about your food and beverages.

Without being preachy, using an infographic presents the data in a way that their potential customers can easily understand and use to make informed decisions.  They not only posted it online, but So Nice is also using it as a printed, informational poster at trade shows as a conversation piece with visitors to the booth.

You can follow So Nice on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/So-Nice/77766940782

Caffè Italiano: 50 Types of Italian Coffee

Caffè Italiano is another mouth-watering infographic from CharmingItaly.com.  I love how they took what could have been a standard drink ingredients visualization one step further and designed it as a menu board for an Italian coffee bar.

For Italians, coffee break is a sort of ritual in which the conviviality is a key point. Around a good coffee you can have a chat, take a few minutes for yourself and relax. It’s not just about inserting something into the stomach.

For Italians, drinking a good coffee is a pleasure: it is something to be sipped and not to be swallowed down; it is something to relish in the fullness of its flavour.

This is why a bad coffee gets Italians in a bad mood, while a good coffee can make their day!

When you enter an Italian Bar, around the clock, pay attention on what’s around you: we bet you won’t find 10 people ordering the same type of coffee!

The types of coffee in the Infographic are written in Italian, so you will be able to order them in the right way at the Bar!

The only problem is that there isn’t any guide or legend for the reader to understand the meaning behind the different colored portions of each drink.  They look carefully designed to be accurate to the how the drinks are mixed, but that effort is lost without an explanation.

Thanks to Paolo for sending in the link!