The Color of Twitter

I really like The Color of Twitter from InfoChimps.org that plots the background colors used by all 40 million of the Twitter.com users.  I do think the infographic would be better if they had actually extended out the default light blue color instead of just noting that it extends 4.8x longer.  They also don’t account for background images that cover the background color, which would account for a large number of people not changing their colors.

As part of the release of a number of new, free Twitter data sets, Infochimps created the following beautiful infographic showing just what color Twitter really is.

The data for the infographic comes from the just-launched Histograms dataset that aggregates anonymous data about Twitter users such as how many users have x number of friends or followers, or how many users are in x location. The company also released new data sets (paid) about stock tickers, hashtags and URLs on Twitter.

Found on Mashable.com

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

From David McCandless at Information is Beautiful, is a great infographic about How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?  This is a fantastic topic for an infographic because the information is so confusing and difficult to find.  I also really like the comparison of how many songs an artist needs to sell to equal the U.S. monthly minimum wage.

This image is based on an excellent post at The Cynical Musician called The Paradise That Should Have Been about pitiful digital royalties. (Thanks to Neilon for pointing that out). I’ve taken his calculations and added a few more.

As ever, this was incredibly difficult to research. Industry figures are hard to get hold of. Some are even secret. Last.Fm’s royalty and payment system is beyond comprehension. (If you can explain it to me, please get in touch)

Found on both Information is Beautiful and Social Media Graphics

Diving the Depths - a really deep infographic

I love how this infographic, Diving the Depths, defies the standard paper or poster size to get it’s message across.  I’m really not a fan of the recent trend towards really tall infographics without purpose, but here the tall banner style actually conveys meaning.  Infographic designed by Big Oak Studios.

Found on Infographics Showcase, a great site that also highlights some of the best infographics from the web.

Thanks to Shell for the link!

100 Characters of Pixar infographic

100 Characters of Pixar is a cool scale infographic showing the relative heights and sizes of the characters from the Pixar movies and shorts.  I found a couple of errors, but the idea and execution are great.  I’ve read before that a great character can be recognized in silhouette, and this is a great tribute to the guys at Pixar.

Found on Flickr, the image is designed by Juan Pablo Bravo

The FedEx Universe

Revised Infographic

Robin Richards (ripetungi) created this infographic about the FedEx Universe for MeetTheBoss.com.  The version above is slightly modified to correct the size of some of the bubbles, add some mind-map style connection lines and add some photo images.

Created for MeetTheBoss.tv, it is a celebration of Fedex as a company and its size.  Working thought creating this, I was amazed at the huge numbers involved in running a global company and getting packages around the earth.  This is what I have tried to show.

I have updated this infographic.  I received some great feedback from Randy Krum over at Coolinfographics.com (Great Site) and on reflection decided that it could be improved with greater use of the bubble mind map graphics.  So that is what I have done.  Also added some more eye candy with images inside of the main bubble totals. Let me know what any thoughts on the old vs the new.

You can see the original version below, and Robin has posted some comment about creating it on his blog, ripetungi.com.  There’s a lesson here for infographic designers everywhere; the viewer sees the area of objects as representative of scale.  So in the original version, the diameter of the bubbles changed with the value, but in the corrected version, the area of the bubbles changes.  When the diameter increased by 2x, that meant that the area increased by 3.5x and the bubbles didn’t accurately represent the values.

Also worth noting that Robin created this infographic in ONE day.  Great work under tight timelines!

Original Version

Heat: A Visual Tour of What's Hot

Our friend, Jess Bachman from WallStats.com, created Heat: A Visual Tour of What’s Hot or Not in the Universe for Rasmussen College.  This fun infographic lines up real-life examples across the entire scale of temperature.

I really like this one, its fun.  Basically it a huge ordered list of temperatures.  Sometimes it just helps to see everything all in one go, to add some perspective.  Also there are cool factoids and such scattered about.  To support my work please digg it and tweet it or otherwise spread the good word!  Thanks y’all.

There are a few humorous entries included in the scale, like the melting point of ice cream at 5°F.  The entire infographic can be seen on the Rasmussen College website.  You can see Jess’ own comments on his blog.

Nice job Jess!

The Scale of the Universe

Check out this great flash animation, The Scale of the Universe, by Fotoshop in his portfolio on NewGrounds.com.  Like one of those infinite zoom images, this flash animation lets you zoom from 1x10-35 to 9.3x1026 by dragging the scroll bar across the bottom.

Since I’m visual, that’s from 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 meters (the Plank Length) up to 930,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters (the estimated size of the universe).

Found on Forgetomori.com

Update on Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 9:08AM by Randy

A dedicated clean-page version is available to see here: http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale-of-the-universe.php

Mega Shark infographic

I love it when someone just decides to create their own infographic.  Stivo (Stephen Taubman) created this Mega Shark infographic to demonstrate the physics behind a giant shark taking down a commercial jet airplane in the movie Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

Last year, I discovered the wonderfully cheezy and sharky movie: Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. While it certainly appealed to a more straight-to-DVD niche market of creature-feature enthusiasts, it wasn’t half bad. Pretty laughable in parts…well actually, in most parts when you consider the wooden acting and crap computer animation. However the most ridiculous scene has to be when Mega Shark takes down a commercial jetliner that is cruising over the middle of the ocean. It was this moment that took the movie from being a little ho-hum to “holy shit, did that shark just eat a plane!?”. Check out the clip for yourself on youtube here.

It’s pretty incredible when you think about it. I mean, how the hell did it do that? What would it require for a shark the size of a plane to launch itself out of the water and take down a moving aircraft? After reviewing some of my basic physics calculations (thanks SUVAT!) I came up with some pretty startling figures. However, it didn’t feel like I would be doing such an epic event justice with just a basic blog post, which meant it was time to do what I love most: an infographic! I had been itching to do one for a while now, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. So with all that said, check out the resulting design below. Oh, and just click on the image to download the full size PDF version for the smaller details.

Great job Stivo!

The Caffeine Poster, How Much Caffeine Are You Drinking? [new infographic]

You are what you drink.  With so many drinks today claiming to be “energy drinks”, I wanted a little visual clarification, so I made The Caffeine Poster.  With coffee drinks on one side and canned cold drinks on the other, you can quickly see how much of a caffeine “hit” (in mg) you will get after consuming.  What’s especially interesting is many of the drinks have a very high caffeine mg/oz ratio, but the drink is so small you don’t get that much total caffeine.

I’ve been working on my own infographic for 6 months now off-and-on when I can make time.  I figured that I’ve been running this infographic blog for a few years now, it’s time to start putting up my own work.  Most of the data visualization I’ve designed are confidential to the company I make them for, so I wanted to create some infographics that I can publish on the blog.

The Caffeine Poster is supposed to help with one decision in your life.  If you’re going to grab a caffeine drink during the day (or evening), which drink should you consume?  I tried to stay focused on telling one story really well.  I’ve heard from others that this may make for a really good infographic, but may not make a great poster because a good poster would have a much deeper level of detail.  I like it, and we’ll see what king of responses I get.

I absolutely want to hear your feedback.  Please add your comments below or send me a note.  What do you think?  I’ve also got requests to print and offer this as a poster.  We’ll see if there is enough interest…

Also, I’m planning to post as “Making-of” article on what it took to create this infographic.

Making-Of The Caffeine Poster - Part 1

Making-Of The Caffeine Poster - Part 2

Making-Of The Caffeine Poster - Part 3

THANKS: A big thanks to Fast Company for posting about The Caffeine Poster on the Fast Company blog.  The Caffeine Poster was the most popular story of the week on Fast Company! 

You are what you drink!

Visualizing Gravity Wells - infographic comic

 

Another great new infographic comic from xkcd.com.  A mix of real science and humor, this one plays on the words “gravity well” by visualizing the strength of each planets gravity as the depth of a crater scaled to Earth’s surface gravity.

The chart shows the “depth” of various solar system gravity wells.

Each well is scaled such that rising out of a physical well of that depth - in constant Earth surface gravity - would take the same energy as escaping that planet’s gravity in reality.

Click on the image to go to the xkcd.com site to see the high-resolution version.

Thanks for sending in the link Ruben!