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

The ICO Explosion of 2017

ICO, or Initial Coin Offering, is a method of fundraising that doesn't sell equity of the company, but selling things called "tokens" or new forms of cryptocurrency. The method has been around for years, but the actual boom didn't start until mid 2017.The 4 Years of ICO Activity infographic from The Next Web shows a summary of the investments made. The video version below gives a more detailed timeline of when and where the companies obtained their investments.

Token sales and initial coin offerings (ICO) were certainly the hottest buzzwords of the year for thousands of recreational cryptocurrency enthusiasts and seasoned investors alike. But have you ever wondered precisely how much money was poured into this trend this year? There’s a visualization that can give you an idea.

Cryptocurrency startup Elementus has compiled a nifty animated visualization that shows every token sale that has successfully raised at least $100,000 since 2014. The graph also displays the entire cashflow that went into these ICOs, with detailed month-by-month information for the past four years.

As you will notice in the video below, following some minor activity for the first three years, all hell breaks lose around May 2017. You can see tens of ICOs kick off around the same time, securing millions in financial backing from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors.

To put all of this data together, Elementus went straight to the source and collected this information first-hand, gleaning the figures directly from the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains.

“We searched for every token, crowdsale, and multisig wallet we could find,” wrote Elementus founder and UPenn adjunct lecturer Max Galka. “We then identified the corresponding owners and added up the total amount of contributed funds – taken either from the blockchain itself or as reported by the fundraiser.”

Found on thenextweb.com

The Economics of a UK Christmas

Do you have a budget for your christmas this year? The Economics of a UK Christmas infographic from Bridging Loans covers the spending for Christmas in the UK, and it continues to rise! The UK spends the most money on gifts, and more specifically on technology!

Here is a cool infographic we have created that provides lots of statistics about Christmas in the UK. The infographic is broken down into sections including overall Christmas spending, what type of stuff we spend the money on and how the UK compares to the rest of Europe.

My biggest feedback on this design, is too many of the statistics are shown as just text alone. Big fonts are not data visualziations, and just showing many of those values doesn't provide context for the audience.

Thanks to Dave for sending in the link!

The Dark Web

We have heard of the dark web. But what is actually sold on it? The Dark Web infographic from Weforum.org reports the revenue totals from 3 categories; illegal drugs, prescription drugs, and non-drugs.

We often hear about the dark web being linked to terrorist plots, drug deals, knife sales and child pornography, but beyond this it can be hard to fully understand how the dark web works and what it looks like.

Just like the forest, the dark web hides things well – it hides actions and it hides identities. The dark web also prevents people from knowing who you are, what you are doing and where you are doing it. It is not surprising, then, that the dark web is often used for illegal activity and that it is hard to police.

Off the paths it is almost impossible to find anything – unless you know what you’re looking for – so it feels a bit like a treasure hunt. Because really the only way to find anything in this vast forest is to be told where to look. This is how the dark web works – and it is essentially the name given to all the hidden places on the internet.

So just for a minute imagine that the whole internet is a forest – a vast expanse of luscious green as far as the eye can see. And in the forest are well worn paths – to get from A to B. Think of these paths as popular search engines – like Google – allowing you as the user the option to essentially see the wood from the trees and be connected. But away from these paths – and away from Google – the trees of the forest mask your vision.

Good use of proportional circle sizes to represent the dollar values!

Found on Weforum.org

Game of Thrones: How Much to Ship Daenerys’ Army?

The team at 1st Move International has calculated How Much Would it Cost to Ship Daenerys’ Army?

The new season of Game of Thrones is on the horizon and *spoiler alert* what this means is we’ll finally get to find out what will happen when Daenerys and her vast army reach the shores of Westeros.

When season six reached its climax, we were left on a tantalising cliff-hanger as Daenerys, complete with three dragons and the backing of both the Unsullied and Dothraki armies, set sail from Meereen in a bid to claim the Iron Throne. It was Ms Targaryen’s sizeable armada, however, that piqued our interest. Shipping large quantities of items is something we specialise in here at 1st Move, and this got us thinking about the logistical efforts behind sending several armies and personnel across the Narrow Sea from Essos to Westeros.

So, we put our heads together and channelled our inner Game of Thrones geekiness to find out what would need moving and just how much this would cost…

Good use of simple white colors on top of the underlying photographs. If you use photos in your infographic design, you want to keep all of the other information in simple colors.

This would be much better if they had visualized the data. Quantities, weights or currency amounts. Visualize the data!

Visualizing the Fortune 500

Visualizing the Fortune 500 is an experiment by the team at Fortune magazine. This is an interactive data visualization site that shows the location of each company's headquarters and the size of the circle represents the company's annual revenue.

People visit and revisit the Fortune 500 for lots of reasons, chief among them: job prospects, sales leads, corporate research and investor information. And bragging rights, of course. Below are two visualizations that allow you to explore the Fortune 500. On the map you'll find every one of the U.S. headquarters from the 2016 list, on the line chart below it, you'll see how each of the companies on the 2016 list has moved through the ranks for the past 20 years.

They also show an interactive visualization of how the companies have moved through the ranks over the last 20 year history of the Fortune 500.

Designed by Nicolas Rapp, using map tiles from Stamen Design.

How Much Would Darth Vader's Suit Cost?

How Much Would Darth Vader's Suit Cost? After Shade Station added up all the state of the art equipment like augmented reality in his helmet, his suit being on par with a NASA space suit, as well as all the medical bills from his prosthetic limbs. The total cost was around $18.3 Million! No worries though, the dark side always seems to have enough money to spend.

Darth Vader is arguably the most memorable character from the Star Wars universe, and his suit is one of the most iconic costumes in film history. But how much would that suit cost in real life?

Quick and easy infographic that does a good job of telling one story really well. I would have visualized the different expenses to show show where most of the money goes.

Thanks to Dave for sending in the link! 

How Much Should You Spend on Sales & Marketing?

 

The Corporate Marketing and Sales Spend Landscape is an infographic about publicly traded companies and how much revenue they spend on sales & marketing. The general rule of thumb, based off of a 2014 Gartner Research study, is that a company should invest 10% of their revenue into marketing. However, a 2014 CMO survey, published by the American Marketing Association and Duke University, came to find that the 10% rule isn't true for all types of companies.

This infographic from Vital is a representation of those findings and shows how much each business style actually spends on marketing. 

Determining the affect of marketing on a company’s growth is not black and white. There are many factors that combine to create a successful and growing business. However, without marketing and sales a company gets very little, if any, promotion or exposure, meaning the chances of growth are slim to none. This is a well-known fact among marketers, evident in the amount of dollars successful corporations allocate towards sales and marketing every year. In 2014, Microsoft, Cisco, Quest Diagnostics, Intel, Salesforce, Constant Contact, LinkedIn, Marketo, Bottomline Technologies, Marin Software, IDEXX Laboratories, Tempur Sealy, Tableau and Twitter among many more all had marketing and sales budgets that were greater than 14% of revenue, some spending as much as 50%! All of these companies also grew year-over-year.

So, how does a company determine how much of their budget to spend on marketing? We decided to look at a handful of some of the most successful large and mid-sized companies across a range of industries to find out how much they allocate for marketing and what they get in return.

Read more at https://vtldesign.com

The order the companies are listed is confusing. There's doesn't seem to be any reasoning behind the sequence. It's not marketing spend dollars or percentage, or total revenue, or revenue growth YOY or even alphabetical.

It's not clear that the orange number shown for each company is the marketing spend dollars, not total revenue. The orange color-coordination with the doughnut chart implies that, but it should be more obvious.

I also think they meant to imply a connection between marketing spend and revenue growth, but that connection is not obvious in the infographic. The revenue growth in gray text-only looks like an afterthought.

Great source citations in the footer. They should also include a copyright statement and the URL link directly to the infographic landing page so readers can find the original full-size version.

This is also a good example of the Fair Use of trademarked logos to report comparisons between the various companies.

Found on Marketing Profs

Update on Friday, November 6, 2015 at 9:32AM by Randy

A number of the doughnut charts mistakenly don't match the values. Bad design error.

The Increasingly Crowded Unicorn Club

The Increasingly Crowded Unicorn Club is visualized by CB Insights in this chart showing the dates when these 141 companies became unicorns by reaching the $1 Billion valuation mark.

We looked at all still-private unicorns since 2011 and charted them based on when they first joined the unicorn club. While initially the chart shows unicorns being created at a relatively calm pace, the rhythm accelerates noticeably in late 2013 (right around the time Aileen Lee wrote her famous post coining the term unicorn in November 2013). Since then, there has been an explosion in unicorn creation, with over 60 new unicorns in 2015 alone.

The heights of the lines have no meaning, they are just connectors to the company logos.

This is a really good visualization that tells one story really well without crowding it with a bunch of extra information about the companies. Knowing that the image will most often be shared as a stand-alone piece, it would have been teer for them to include the URL back to the original infographic and a copyright statement in the infographic JPG image file itself.

Largest Company by Revenue in Each State 2015

The Largest Company by Revenue in Each State 2015 map was created by Broadview Networks by using Hoover’s, a D&B Company's data. Even though there might be "bigger" companies in each state than the ones represented, the map is specifically looking at the greatest amount of revenue from the 2015 financial year.

You may have seen the Largest Companies by Revenue map we put together in June of last year, well we’re back with an updated version using Hoover’s 2015 data.  Last year’s map created so much buzz and insightful conversation that we deemed it essential to find out how it’s changed over the past year.  Using Hoover’s, a D&B Company, we searched through each state’s list of companies to find which had the largest revenue in the last fiscal year.  It was interesting to see how each company’s revenues have changed over the year (for better or worse) and to see if a new largest company had emerged.

At first glance, you may ask, “Where are Apple and Microsoft?”  Yes, these are huge companies but this map is specifically looking at total revenue from the last fiscal year.  If we look at California with Apple vs. Chevron, there is a large discrepancy between market value and total revenues.  Apple’s market value as of March 31, 2015 was $724 billion while Chevron’s was only (and we use “only” lightly) $197 billion.  In terms of revenue, Chevron comes out on top with $203 billion in the last fiscal year while Apple had revenues of $182 billion.

Please note: We used Hoover’s company database as our source, not the most recent Fortune 500 list.  Location and state are based on the corporate headquarters of that company, no branches or foreign offices.  Lastly, we decided not to include any subsidiaries or government entities for the sake of staying consistent.

I liked how they didn't manipulate the US map. Manipulation would have taken the focus away from the company's logos. If you click on the infographic, the original allows you to zoom in close enough to comfortably see small states, like CVS is Rhode Island's largest company of 2015. This infographic could of easily been overworked but instead they kept it simple.

The company post inspired a lot of discussion about the data, and I think that was part of the purpose behind the design. Is this the best data to show? Where are some of the more recognizable companies? There's even at least one error in the map.

Found on Broadview Networks VoIP Blog