Honda Accord: 30 Years of U.S. Production

Honda Accord: 30 Years of American Craftmanship is a large infographic from Honda America that was released as part of the release of the new 2013 model design of the Honda Accord in August.  Designed by Jeremy Yingling with InfoNewt (my company) this is a very brand specific, marketing-style infographic.

IN 2012, HONDA WILL MARK 30 YEARS OF ACCORD PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES.

The first Japanese nameplate manufactured in the U.S., the second-generation Accord first rolled off the Marysville, Ohio assembly line in November of 1982. In the 30 years since, more than nine million U.S.-built1 Accords have helped define American manufacturing craftsmanship. The all-new 2013 Honda Accord will once again redefine space efficiency and driving joy in the midsize class, signaling the start of Honda’s next three-decade chapter of building the Accord in America. 

The 2013 model becomes the ninth major design generation of the Accord.  This gave us the opportunity to highlight differences each major model design has brought to the Accord over the last 30 years.  The design visualizes the major technical specifications, the major advancements included in the Accord and shows the multi-year periods that each design generation was available.  The eye-catching color-waterfall shows the available exterior colors available for every model year, and the milestones along the left-side of the design show the progression to reach a cumulative total over 9 million Accords produced in 2012 coming out of the manufacturing plant in Marysville, OH.

Honda has done a great job of utilizing this one infographic design in a handful of different ways.  The infographic was initially used as 9’ banners at the Honda press events, and included in the press kits provided to everyone invited to attend.  Honda has now released the infographic online on the Honda News page on Flickr, making the design available to everyone.

Update on Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 10:00AM by Randy

You can see photos of the PR banner, read more about how the design was used in multiple ways by Honda PR and some “behind the design” information about the designing the infographic on the InfoNewt blog.

Honda Accord Infographic PR Banner, Behind the design

The History of Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse hasn’t just survived for 80 years, he has thrived. The History of Mickey Mouse infographic from Goin2Travel.com has condensed this famous mouse life style into a highlight timeline.

Mickey Mouse is the most recognizable Disney character on the planet. After more than 80 years of stardom, we thought it would be fun to review the history of this iconic mouse. From humble beginnings during the “roaring twenties”, surviving and even flourishing during the “great depression” right up to the digital age present, he and his fellow, Disney stars, are favorites of children everywhere.

So whether your planning a visit to Disney World Orlando, or just a fan,  sit back, relax, and enjoy this visual history trip through time of Mickey Mouse.

They did a good job of showing the reader actual images and photos of Mickey through the years, and I like the use of Mickey Hands as the arrowheads on the connecting lines.  

The biggest issue is that many of the images are so far away from the correct year along the righthand side, that it’s very hard to follow the connecting lines.  You really don’t want images from the 1950s visually placed next to 1970s on the timeline.  I would suggest putting the years down the middle and placing the event images on both sides so they can be adjacent to the actual time on the timeline.

The URL at the bottom should be a link to the original infographic instead of the frontpage of the company site.  You want readers to be able to find the original infographic when it’s not correctly linked on the Web.

Visual History of Cooper Black

Where’s Waldo?  More like where’s Cooper Black?  The font is everywhere! The Visual History of Cooper Black infographic was created by fibers.com to show their love for Cooper Black.

You might not know it, but you’ve seen Cooper Black. On the shop-front, in naughty magazines, album covers and candy wrappers - this depression era novelty font gets around. And why wouldn’t it, it’s curvaceous and friendly, as the type designer who created this font said, “It’s a typeface for farsighted printers with nearsighted customers.

We think Cooper Black is just lovely, with a rich and robust history - so we put that history down visually with this infographic. 

What a great topic and design!  This topic just screams for the design to show the reader actual examples of Cooper Black in action, and the use of images in the timeline does just that.  The design is focused on telling just one story, the timeline, and is fun & easy to read.

Thanks to Alia for sending in the link!

The Visual History of Swimwear

The History of Swimwear infographic is a visual timeline from Backyard Ocean that shows the evolution of the swimsuit over the last 150 years.

The swimsuit: a symbol of stylish summer fun. Parade it on the beach or in the privacy of your above ground pool at home. Swimwear’s history has grown from cavemen furs to science fiction fancies. Artsy, classy, conservative or sexy, the swimsuit is an icon of summer style and fashion. Backyard Ocean takes a breath from swimming to see just how the swimsuit has changed through time. CLICK on the image to enlarge!

This is a design by Jeremy Yingling with InfoNewt (my company).  Each model on the timeline has an illustration showing off the fashions, and represents either a new suit design or a famous example from TV & movies.  My favorite part is the associated pie chart visualizing the amount of skin coverage for each swimsuit (or lack thereof).

The design also plots the amount of skin coverage over time, the evolution of the “thong” and how skin exposure does not automatically equate to higher sex appeal.

Thanks to the team at Backyard Ocean! 

The Rising Cost of Higher Education

The Rising Cost of Higher Education from SchoolTutoring Academy does a good job visually showing the reader how quickly the price of college educations have risen.

Attending a college or university represents a significant investment for families. Tuition fees have continued to rise which has made it increasingly difficult for families to accurately budget and save. This problem is exacerbated for low and middle-income families where tuition fees as a percentage of median family income has increased significantly. Learn how affordable tutoring can help your child.

The design gets to the point immediately.  If the reader only looks at the top portion of the infographic (without scrolling down) they still walk away understanding the key message of how dramatically college costs have risen as a percentage of the median family income.  However, I don’t see any indication that the values have been adjusted for inflation or not.

I also like the concentric doughnut graphs that are used with consistent colors to show the same 8-year comparison for different income level families.  The line chart comparison of annual costs is also clear and easy to understand.

The lower portion of the design becomes too text heavy, and begins to show data values in text without visualizing them.  This is where the design will start to lose readers by trying to convey too much text information.  What is the icon in the description of Private Loans?

The bottom of the design is missing a copyright (or Creative Commons) license and should also include the URL to the infographic landing page where readers can find the original, high-resolution version.

Evolution of the F1 Car: Video & Infographic

This is totally cool!  Here is an infographic animation created by Rufus Blacklock of his infographic Evolution of the F1 Car. You can find his original video on biplaneblues.blogspot.com.

All done :) here you can watch 60 years of F1 design condensed into a minute. Each car is the winning chassis from the respective seasons. The music is ‘Together’ by She.

 

Here is the original Evolution of the F1 Car infographic that the video was based off of. Found at biplaneblues.blogspot.com.

Woo finished! This map tracks the history of F1 cars across the circuit at Monza. Hopefully its clear enough… its my first infographic, let me know if you have any keen ideas to improve readability.

The cars are grouped into decades, around the track you can follow various innovations and driver aids, some which became banned. Top right is steering wheel development.

The Trivi.al Side of Trivia

Here’s some trivia on trivia! The history of trivia is mapped out in a board game fasion in The Trivi.al Side of Trivia infographic from trivi.al. The game we love is now an app! 

We’re a few days away from releasing our app Trivi.al. It’s in the hands of Apple now and we wanted to share with you an Infographic that we put together on the history of trivia called “The Trivi.al Side of Trivia.”

It’s a fascinating industry with a lot of cool tidbits of knowledge we’ve throughly enjoyed learning about. And, this journey has led us to meet so really cool people from all over the world. We’ve talked with people from New York to London to Warsaw, Poland and many more in between. We’ve loved the journey so far and we hope it continues to grow as we introduce you to the app. Stay tuned and if you enjoy the infographic leave us a comment below. We’ll have some printed versions soon so if your interested let us know. Thanks

As a great way to promote thier new iOS app, Trivi.al created an infographic timeline history fo trivia that starts with taverns (places of ill repute) in Roman times and follows the trail throughout history leading up to their app launch.

Not much in the way of data visualizations, but the illustrations of celbrities, games and gameshows draw in the reader to see if they can recognize any of them.  Cool promotional infographic. 

Thanks to Joey for sending in the link!

200+ Infographic Resumes, an escalating trend

Pinterest Board of Infographic Resumes

Back in January of 2010, I posted 16 Infographic Resumes, A Visual Trend that highlighted the start of the trend of infographics and data visualization moving into resumes.  Why 16?  Because that’s how many good examples I could find at the time on the Internet to showcase the concept.  Two and a half years later, that post continues to be one of the most viewed blog posts on Cool Infographics with an average of 3,500 views every month.  A 2.5 year-old blog post!

Since then, the idea of infographic visual resumes has exploded.  I have continued to gather links to infographic resumes, and my collection is now over 200 examples of infographic resumes that have been published online.  Instead of trying to post them here on the blog like I did in 2010, I’m experimenting by creating a Pinterest Board dedicated to sharing Infographic Visual Resumes.  I will continue to add resumes and grow the board, so follow the board if you want to see new ones as they are addded.  If you know of any that I should include, add the link in the comments or send a link through the Contact form with “Infographic Resume” in the Subject line. 

The Cinderella Story example is the Chris Spurlock resume shown below.  The story is that Chris was a graduating Journalism major at Missouri School of Journalism in early 2011, and created his infographic resume because he wanted to pursue data journalism as a career.  It was posted on the J-School blog, but quickly went viral on the Internet.  As a result, he was hired as an Infographic Design Editor for the Huffington Post!

I haven’t made any distintion between good and bad designs on the Pinterest board, because all of the designs can give you good ideas about types of data visualizations you can include in your own design.  The only distinction I have made is that they have to include some type of data visualization to be considered infographic.  There are many, many great graphic designer visual resumes that aren’t “infographic” so they aren’t included on the board.

Also, I have attempted to link each design back to the original owner’s site (like Chris’ resume above), but for many the public posting is on a portfolio site like Behance or Visual.ly.  If any of these should be linking to a different location, please send me a note through the Contact page, and I’ll get them linking to the correct places.

It’s definitely worth mentioning that there are a whole bunch of new online sites launching to capitalize on this growing trend.  The service they offer is to create an automatic infographic resume for you, usually based on your LinkedIN profile.  Vizualize.me, re.vu, Kinzaa, ResumUP and cvgram.me all create an infographic resume for you using their pre-designed templates.  I’ve tried to only include a couple examples from each service because 50 resumes based on the same template won’t provide you more inspiration to design your own.  My opinion is that these sites and templates are currently new enough to help your resume stand out, but very quickly the risk is that the templates will become recognized (like PowerPoint templates).

I’m planning a separate, future post about the best practices when designing your own infographic resume, but I wanted to shared the Pinterest Board with you as a resource for inspiration.

Please add a comment with your thoughts about the future of infographic resumes!

Digital Technology in Your Car

Here is an infographic from Allianz called Digital Technology in Your Car that illustrates current technology in our cars to keep us safe and entertain us.

Digital technology has transformed and continues to transform every aspect of our lives. In the motor industry, technology developed throughout the years has enhanced our safety and comfort. The introduction of modern safety mechanisms such as lane departure warning and brake assist systems as well as iphone applications such as Driver Reviver and Car Butler has seen technology faithfully assisting drivers in times of need. With technology advancing and disseminating at a rapid rate, Global Positioning System units have already become a staple accessory in Australian cars.

There’s not much in the way of data visualizations in this one, but it does tell a good story about the history of new technology in your car, and what’s coming soon.  There’s too much text, but the use of icons and illustrations helps the story.  

I’m not sure what all the dead space at the bottom is.  Plenty of room for the copyright, company logo, URL to the original landing page and even a mention of the designer.

Bring on the self-driving cars!

Thanks to Sandra for sending in the link!

How Draw Something Blew Up Without Blowing Up

Now here is a game for everyone! It doesn’t matter how well you can draw, you can just draw and laugh with your friends at your attempts! This app has become very popular and quite quickly, the How Draw Something Blew Up Without Blowing Up infographic from The Next Web (with help from Couchbase) charts the growing trendiness of this game.

Draw Something was downloaded 50 million times in 50 days. Users created billions of drawings, adding 3,000 new pictures every second. On March 21st, OMPOP, the company behind the game, was bought up by Zynga for more than $200 million. On the first weekend in April, I downloaded the game for my first time and was admittedly addicted for 72 hours.

Today, a company called Couchbase gave us the exclusive on an infographic that charts the app’s viral growth. In case you’ve not heard of Couchbase, it’s the platform that enabled the game to keep up with its NoSQL database technology — from 6 database servers to more than 90 — without a second of game downtime. That’s impressive.

The infographic below charts the amount of user data, drawings per second, number of servers used to keep the game up and going and the number of users over 8 weeks of the game’s mind-blowing growth. The only question now is, will the game’s addictive nature keep fans or will they get over it as quickly as I have?

Intended as a quick summary of Draw Something’s growth, and Couchbase’s success in supporting their database expansion needs, this infographic does a good job.  Simple, easy-to-understand visuals, and use of some hand-sketch illustrations to reinforce how Draw Something works.

Some visualizations in the Billions of Drawings section would have been nice to communicate the immense scale of the growth numbers.  Most readers don’t truly grasp the difference between 10 million and 2 billion by just reading the text numbers.