How America Uses its Land

America's land use is very diverse and scattered throughout the states. By using surveys, satellite images and categorizations the U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. Bloomberg took that data, and created the How America Uses its Land infographics. The infographics use the map to show both how much of the country is made up of a certain land use, and where the majority of it is located.

Using surveys, satellite images and categorizations from various government agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. The data can’t be pinpointed to a city block—each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land. But piecing the data together state-by-state can give a general sense of how U.S. land is used.

Gathered together, cropland would take up more than a fifth of the 48 contiguous states. Pasture and rangeland would cover most of the Western U.S., and all of the country’s cities and towns would fit neatly in the Northeast.

Found on https://5wvelascoblog.com

Digital Marketing Tools Landscape

The Essential Digital Marketing Tools infographic from Smart Insights is a cleaner approach to a landscape design style, and only covers their top 5 picks in each of 30 different categories.

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost tools to give us insight about our customers, competitors and market. They also help us compete by delivering automated relevant, real-time communications integrated across desktop and mobile and digital plus traditional marketing channels.

To help highlight the range of great options available, our infographic and free Digital Marketing Tools and Services 2016 download recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category. We’ve grouped them across the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework for managing digital marketing so you can review where you could make better use of the tools across the customer lifecycle.

What inspired us to create this infographic and guide?

We were inspired by Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology landscape which does an excellent job of defining ‘enterprise’ tools for managing digital marketing, but can be difficult to read because of the sheer number of tools. Also, we wanted to include more low-cost and free ‘hands-on’ insight tools which are important for managing activities like Search, Social media and conversion rate optimisation. These don’t tend to be included on Scott’s landscape. We also wanted to highlight the most popular, well-regarded services, particularly those which can be used across all sizes of businesses rather than being affordable only by the biggest brands.

I'm generally not a fan of these complex landscape designs. They're cluttered, complex, and don't help readers understand the information very effectively. I think the Smart Insights design helps readers significantly by choosing a limited number to include, and the circular format makes for an improved reading experience.

I also like the use of this infographic as content to draw in readers for their larger report on these marketing tools. As I wrote in my article "Marketing FAIL: Infographics Hidden Behind Registration Walls"

My personal belief is that they were also inspired by The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3, which I also think is a good landscape design style.

Navigating The Agile Landscape

The Agile Landscape v3 is a visualization of many of the methodologies within the Agile Process by Chris Webb from Deloitte that uses the visualization design style of a subway map to group related activites and the show connections. Chris posted a longer description of the design on the Deloitte blog: Navigating the Agile Landscape

Chris Webb:

Being Agile isn’t as simple as following one single methodology. In fact, Agile encompasses a number of different practices and frameworks, often referred to as “the Agile umbrella.” For an organisation to be successful in adopting Agile ways of working, it requires the right technique/method to be used to address the problem or need.

Given there are so many different Agile frameworks, a challenge many organisations or individuals face is deciding which framework to use and in which context. In this post, we use an analogy to help bring some light to this.

We like to conceptualise Agile as a highly interconnected landscape of practices transporting ideas across zones to value. There is no perfect starting point, nor an express line or a direct route suiting all conditions.We’ll leave you to explore the Agile Landscape, and leave you with this:

Do not be afraid to try, learn and adapt practices to your situation. The truth is, no one framework is better than another. Although when it is contextually applied, a framework or selection of practices from multiple frameworks will be best suited.

We are continuously evolving this view to include new practices and ways of working. If you see a framework that is missing and would like to see it added to this view, or if you would like a larger version of the Agile landscape please reach out at chwebb@deloitte.com.au

I often teach students to experiment by mixing different data visualization methods with different kinds of data, and good designs like this are often the result.

My criticism of the design would be that the overall feel is way too complicated because many of the paths have unnecessry curves and loops to fit within the constraint of a 4:3 aspect ratio of a presentation slide. The design would be easier to understand and appear more elegant if the paths were staightened out. This would make a larger design, but viewing online or using a 16:9 presentation slide would eliminate the constraint.

Backyard Sports Court Dimensions

What a great use of an infographic!  From LandscapingNetwork.com comes The Guide to Backyard Sports Court Dimensions.

Get common court dimensions for basketball, horseshoes, shuffleboard, bocce ball, badminton, volleyball and tennis.

The topic is perfect to drive links and traffic to a landscaping site.  People are always looking up these dimensions, and by covering all seven of these in one infographic, this will attract views for years to come.  I was looking up the basketball free throw line dimension just last week!