The Massive SciFi Starship Size Comparison Chart

The massive SciFi Starship Size Comparison Chart is one of my favorite infographic design projects. Designed by Dirk Loechel and shared on DeviantArt, this is a project he has been working on for years. I posted an earlier version of his design in 2013 here which was hugely popular. Dirk’s notes claim that this may be the last update.

The last update

For real this time: This is the final major content update, though if there are issues I’ll still fix them. I also haven’t forgotten I wanted to vectorize the writing. It’s still on the radar. But content-wise, I think that is about all I can put in. 

Also, I added the ISS. For scale. It’s on top, with a yellow frame so it’s relatively easy to find.

Lots of errors fixed, lots of new ships too. Well, off for now, but I’ll be replying in the comments more or less regularily. 

This is probably at least for the forseseeable future the last round of adding ships. I have pretty much all I wanted now (excepting some old scifi, and many Anime series, which tend to not have many usable images). Lots of new content.

And that’s it for now. Enjoy the new-and-improved chart! 

This is one of the visual designs that clearly demonstrates why visuals can be much more effective than text descriptions. Especially when it comes to comparing size and scale. You just don’t comprehend the scope when someone tells you that the Star Wars Executor Class Super Star Destroyer is 19,000 meters long. You have to see it in comparison to something you already know.

The images on DeviantArt are high enough in resolution, that you can download and print it out as a poster yourself to hang on your wall. The full-size poster resolution is 4,268 x 5,690 pixels. Most of the ships are clustered by franchise (Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, Eve, Warhammer, etc.). As a reality check, the International Space Station (ISS) is included for reference.

Found on Geyser of Awesome, Nerd Approved and Nerdist

The Guide to Star Trek Uniforms

The Gude to Star Trek Uniforms infographic from Costume Supercenter. Make sure you know what uniform your wearing!

When the original Star Trek television series started, male and female officers wore similar outfits. The male Star Trek uniforms consisted of black pants, black boots and a velour shirt with the symbol on the left side. Females wore the same type of shirt, with black boots and tights, and a black skirt, although in some cases they wore black pants. The color of shirt worn identified the branch the crew member belonged to. Those in green shirts worked for command personnel, while beige stood for operations, and blue was for medical personnel only. The velour shirts were changed to nylon shirts starting in the third season. You can find many of the Star Trek Costumes here.

Don’t be the red-shirted ensign!

The footer of the design should include the copyright information and the URL to the original infographic landing page so readers can see the full-size infographic.  The Costume Supercenter logo should also be somewhere on the design to connect the infographic to the publishing company.

Found on Visual.ly

Star Wars vs. Star Trek

Which one wins, Star Wars or Star Trek? This is one of the most heavily debated question of all time. The Star Wars vs Star Trek infographic from hark.com and TrekNews.net will not give you the answer on who is better… However, it will give you some concrete numbers on things like awards, social media followers, number of video games, and movies.

The war wages on. The battle between two of sci-fi’s most iconic franchises, Star Trek and Star Wars, is a battle that has been discussed by fans for over 30 years. The recent news of J.J. Abrams accepting the director’s job on the next Star Wars film, only fanned the flames.

Today’s infographic pits the two franchises against each other once again — with criteria including number of films, box office gross, number of Academy, Grammy and Emmy Awards, video games, books, toys, and social media followers.

This is a fun topic, perfect to incite discussion and links from the online community.  My only criticism of the design is the many of the statistics are not visualized.  Big fonts are not visualizations, so the infographic would be easier to comprehend if numbers like the Total Box Office Gross proceeds were visualized.

Found on infographicjournal.com

Star Trek: The Original Series

The Star Trek infographic designed by Natalya Platonova was originally designed in Russian for Svinovik.ru. This infographic is a visual overview of some quirky statistics from the complete original series (three seasons).

Overall, very well done!  As a Trekkie myself, the visualizations are fun facts about the series, and well designed.  I like that the quantitative values (like the uniforms worn) are shown as the actual numbers and not scaled. 

A couple of framing pieces of information would have been helpful.  The original design is published along with a text article, but some introductory text in the infographic itself would be nice because the image file gets shared without any of the text from the article.  The fotter should include some type of copyright or Creative Commons license and the URL for readers to be able to find the original, full-size versions.

Here’s the original version in Russian:

Found on Visual Loop!

15 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek [infographic]

Posted on Dump.com, the 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Star Trek infographic from designer Ricky Linn.

You can see the high-resolution version in Ricky’s Flickr photostream.

Thanks to Ben for sending in the link!

A HubSpotter's Guide to the (Social Media) Galaxy

I love this humorous Star Trek parody take on how to man your Marketing crew to be prepared to explore the (social media) galaxy!  From HubSpot.com, A HubSpotter’s Guide to the Galaxy is an infographic designed by our friend Mike Wirth.

Sometimes marketing seems like a cosmic adventure through social media, the blogosphere and other new, unknown regions of the internet!  Here’s how HubSpot imagines businesses traversing through the galaxy to meet new beings, engage with them and exchange new ideas!

Mike, where’s the holodeck so we can interact with infographics???

Analytics according to Captain Kirk

This is fun one from Matt Bailey, founder of SiteLogic.com.

You can read his full description here, but the point is the use of images in the chart so you can visualize the relationship between separate pieces of information. Phasers represent fights in each episode, Kirk's photo represents affairs during the episode with Captain Kirk and the colored shirts show fatalities of an actor in that colored shirt in that particular episode. Proving once and for all that being a red-shirted ensign is a hazardous job on the Enterprise.