Author Archives: 5wgraphicsblog

About 5wgraphicsblog

Founder and Creative Director of The 5W Velasco Design Group

New tools: Data Illustrator and Charticulator

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Anyone interested in creating their own data visualizations should be giddy with delight with the quickly growing number of tools available to create them without any need for programming skills, and in most cases for free: Tableau, Flourish, Datawrapper, RawGraphs, Chartbuilder or QGIS (for mapping) are some of the best, and the list goes on and on. I’m convinced in a relatively short time drag and drop tools with be as powerful and flexible as D3.js and other developer tools, making data visualization accesible to everyone.

The exciting news is seeing two software giants entering the field with new web-based tools: Adobe launched Data Illustrator a few months ago in a collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Microsoft Research is behind the just released Charticulator. Both work very intuitively, allowing the author to bind multiple attributes of data to graphical elements. They are indeed powered by D3.js, among other libraries.

Both offer introduction videos in their hope pages. Here is Data Illustrator:

And here is Charticulator:

 

The tools offer tutorial sections and multiple step-by-step videos in their galleries; and they link to the research papers describing the tools, which are worth reading (Data Illustrator, Charticulator).

Creating complex visualizations like the chord diagram below seems ridiculously simple in Charticulator, and the same can be said of Data Illustrator’s visualizations. See the video:

This is not a review as I have just started playing with them, but on first look both tools are impressive. It’s still really early in their development, but if Adobe and Microsoft throw their mighty resources to support and improve them, we can expect great things in the near future. Perhaps one day Data Illustrator could be embedded within Adobe Illustrator, allowing designers to work fluidly and easily between D3 and Illustrator without leaving the graphical interface. And Charticulator could integrate into PowerPoint. Stay tuned!

 

 

The Forbidden City: infographics by The South China Morning Post

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The always amazing graphics department of the South China Morning Post has been publishing a series of stories about the Forbidden City of Beijing. It’s one of my favorite project this year. The whole package by the Hong Kong newspaper is a great combination of art, simple and elegant explanatory graphics, and engaging, well researched storytelling. It paints a vivid portrait of life inside the palace complex where 24 emperors of the Ming and Qin dynasties ruled China for nearly 500 years (early 15th century to early 20th century). The combination of rich details in the graphics, a loose hand-made illustration style, and the unusual bold color choices in a historical feature make it a visual feast. Here are a few samples. Click for larger images (˙© The South China Morning Post):

The Illustrated opened are really nice as well

The series was created by Marcelo Duhalde and Marco Hernández, in collaboration with Pablo Robles, Alice Tse, Darren Long, and Tom Eves. It has two main chapters with their own illustrated sub-sections:

  1. The Forbidden City’s Unique Architecture

2. Life inside the Forbidden City

It’s a good example of a well integrated package entirely created within a graphics department. The few interactive or animated elements are used judiciously, only when needed.

I’m hoping the series continues with new chapters, and I would bet the authors have thought of compiling the whole package in a book since the design and topic naturally lend to it.

The Forbidden City has always been a favorite topic ever since I created a National Geographic poster on the topic back in 2008, including researching in situ in Beijing. I researched, designed and wrote it, and the illustrations are by the great Bruce Morser, the most precise pencil illustrator I’ve ever worked with.

Here is a page that compiles many of the best online infographics of the South China Morning Post, and this a remarkable compilation of graphics as they were published in print.

Updated samples in our website

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In the last few days we have been busy updating the gallery section of our website with lots of additional samples. It had not been updated in a long time. The new images are a mix of recent and older graphics, including some of the graphics done during my years at National Geographic magazine (For those Nat Geo graphics, sometimes including collaboration with other researchers and artists).

Feel free to navigate to see a range of different types of graphics including charts, diagrams and maps. You can also look by subject or technique, and see examples of branding and graphics style guides from our consulting side. Here are some of the newly uploaded samples, in no particular order (here and on the website, click on any image for a larger version):

We are working on more extensive changes to our website, with a fully responsive and redesigned site coming up before the end of the year. It will include examples of interactive graphics and animations, and this blog will be part of the main site. In the meantime, if you are interested in additional samples or want to get in touch, drop us an email to contact@5wgraphics.com.

How America Uses Its Land

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We just came across a really engaging graphics feature by Bloomberg.com. How America Uses Its Land, by Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby. It’s well sourced and nicely designed. As the intro states, “The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.” There are quite a few surprises for the reader, such as the massive amount of land used as cow pasture/range (see map above). 41 percent of U.S. land in the contiguous states is used as pasture or cropland used to produce feed.

Here is the overall distribution of land uses:

Forest and timberland take another large chuck of the space. Did you know a company called Weyerhauser Co. owns or controls an area of timberland equivalent to the size of West Virginia?

 

 

Data graphics for the Inter-American Development Bank

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The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is the largest source for development financing for LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) countries. Founded in 1959 and based in Washington DC, IDB produces regular reports on trade, economic integration, poverty and social inequalities reduction, environmental sustainability and other issues.

We recently started collaborating with IDB with some data graphics on trade integration. The LAC countries have extensive trade gaps and missing links (countries or areas without preferential trade agreements). The chart above highlights bilateral trade links between countries missing the advantage of preferential trade agreements. It’s a redesign of the graphic below, an “spaghetti map” which we found hard to follow. We used a more rational geometric design (the real geography doesn’t help here), and different weights/colors depending on the amount of trade to establish hierarchy and visual clarity.

There are multiple, small size trade agreements in the area but the goal is a region-wide Free Trade Agreement (LAC-FTA) that is able to compete in the global scene. The graphic below shows the size of the proposed agreement compared to other large trade agreements in the world, and to the economies or other countries and the world as a whole.

And the graphic below also refers to the lacks of agreements between different regions and countries in the area, this time as a grid. The empty spaces are the focus of interest here.

To know more about the issue, you can download the recent IDB publication here in English, Spanish or Portuguese (this version doesn’t include our graphics):

Connecting the Dots: A Road Map for a Better Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (© 2018 Inter-American Development Bank, Integration and Trade Sector)

 

New Infographics and Dataviz workshops: Dallas, NYC, San Diego and Washington DC

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Our 5W Academy (a learning division of 5W Infographics focused on educational programs, workshops and conferences) is announcing four new editions of the popular two-day Infographics and Data Visualization workshop. We’ll be heading to Dallas (September 13-14, New York City (October 2-3), San Diego (October 18-19), and Washington DC (October 25-26). Learn more about the instructors and schedule of the new workshops in our page. We are offering a good discount for early bird registrations. You can register directly in our Eventbrite pages:

We received great feedback from our most recent US workshops, in DC and San Francisco last April and May. In each case, a combination of local and out-of-state participants from government agencies, design and advertising studios, NGOs and other organizations got together for two days. The workshops are a comprehensive introduction to the creation of infographics and data visualization. No previous experience is needed. You can find some frequently asked questions about our workshops in this post.

 

DC and San Francisco workshops

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Workshop_DC_1

5W Academy is heading to San Francisco in a few days for our next Infographics and Data visualization workshop in the US. It will be on May 10-11.

We received great feedback from our Washington D.C. workshop last week. A combination of local and out-of-state participants from government agencies, design and advertising studios, NGOs and other organizations got together for two days (photos above and below).

Workshop_DC_2

The two-day workshop is a comprehensive introduction to the creation of infographics and data visualization. With a mix of theory and practice, the workshop is aimed at professionals and students interested in developing the skills to produce engaging, insightful visual storytelling with their content. No previous experience with infographics or specialized software is required.

We will learn about gathering and preparing data, the Do’s and Don’ts of working with numerical information and charts, and the principles of visual hierarchy, color, typography, illustration, and narrative to create impactful infographics.

Attendees will sketch out infographics, storyboard motion graphics and create / publish their interactive data visualizations and web maps with the help of Tableau Public, Flourish and other tools for non-programmers. The class will discuss award-winning projects and offer an overview of tools and strategies for creating infographics and data visualization.

After San Francisco, our next workshop will be in Singapore, the next edition of our popular Power of Infographics workshop (May 24-25), hosted by our friends at Methodology.

Learn more about the instructors and schedule of our San Francisco workshop in our page or register directly here. See you soon in California!

SF1

Infographics workshop in Utretch

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Next September I’ll be in Utretch (Netherlands) teaching a two-day workshop on infographics and data visualization for print and online. It’s organized by Graphic Hunters, an initiative by Goof van de Winkel that provides training on graphical literacy, infographic storytelling, online data visualization and more in the Netherlands with international trainers. It will be my second time around after a great experience in Amsterdam two years ago (photo below).

Here is more information on the workshop, which will take place on September 27-28, 2018. No previous experience is required. The course is suited to anyone who’s interested in learning how to communicate effectively through data visualization and infographics. It could appeal to graphic designers, editors, communications or marketing professionals, data analysts and/or researchers. It’s a mix of theory and lots of hands-on exercises where we’ll look at some principles of visual storytelling, design, best practices with charts and maps, tools and key concepts in interactive and data visualization, and more. We’ll also have a chance to practice with great tools non-developers can use to create online data visualization and maps, such as Tableau, Flourish or Datawrapper.

The class will take place in English in Utretch’s beautiful Central Museum. If you are interested in attending, please contact Goof van de Winkel at info@graphichunters.nl or dial +0 31 06 28383150.

 

New book: Practical Tableau

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Anyone interested in data visualization with Tableau should take note of a new book being published this month: Practical Tableau — 100 Tips, Tutorials, and Strategies from a Tableau Zen, by Ryan Sleeper (published by O’Reilly). The book is a comprehensive and useful overview that can be used by complete beginners as well as by people with more advanced skills. Structured as a collection of 100 short “tip” chapters, it has multiple step-by-step tutorials to build a broad variety of chart types and introductions to working with filters, parameters, calculated fields, and other advanced options in Tableau. It also outlines principles of storytelling with data, using color, dashboards, etc. Overall, it’s an eminently practical guide that I can easily recommend (another great Tableau guide is this book by Ben Jones).

During our 5W Academy workshops (next in Washington D.C. and San Francisco), we do a few hands-on exercises with Tableau. It’s a powerful and intuitive drag and drop tool to build data visualizations.

Tableau has some shortcomings: a couple of examples are the less than optimal handling of responsiveness for different screen sizes, or the lack of map projections (although Tableau now works with spatial files such as shapefiles, GeoJSON, KML, etc.). And it’s a closed system. For simple charts/maps and limited datasets many users maybe be better served by using Datawrapper, Flourish or other recent and excellent open-source dataviz tools for non-developers, but Tableau’s robust and comprehensive data analysis capabilities still make it a preferred tool in many organizations. As an example, the United Nations just announced it’s adopting Tableau as their visual analytics standard across its multiples agencies.

Practical Tableau is due to be released this month as a paperback, and the Kindle version is already available.

 

 

Our Power of Infographics workshop, back in Singapore in May

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I’ll be back in Singapore on May 24-25 teaching a new edition of the 2-day workshop “The Power of Infographics” organized by Methodology. Fortunately, the workshop has continued to be in high demand and is nearing the 10th edition since 2015.

Methodology was co-founded by two of the most talented designers in Singapore: Brian Ling of Design Sojourn and Jackson Tan of Black Design and contemporary art collective Phunk. It organizes public and corporate workshops in Singapore and the rest of South East Asia. “We believe that design can make a positive difference to the world and we seek to be custodians of this change by curating and sharing the world’s best creative ideas and design processes. We collaborate with global leaders at the forefront of design, craft and innovation to develop education programs, workshops, conferences and media.”

The workshop is attended by a mix of professionals including designers, marketers, students, and civil servants from different areas of the government. They are looking for an introduction to visual storytelling and the principles, tools and techniques to find visual insight in our content by using infographics, charts, maps and data visualization (both in print and online).

Register here or contact Methodology at admin@methodology.sg for more information.