Name: Ben Willers
Age: 28

Visualising data for 2 years
Find him on Visual.ly: b_willers
 

1. Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get into design, and how long have you been doing it?

I studied graphic design, and then on the MA design program at the University of Lincoln in England, graduating with a distinction in January 2012. It wasn’t until after I begun my postgraduate studies that I began to use data visualization techniques, however after completing about a third of the course I re-submitted my proposal to make this my focus. I created a series of visual representations of my life after meticulously recording my daily activities including walking distances, sleeping, television viewing and bank account activity. These outcomes, as well as a series of logbooks I created to document my time throughout the course can found on my website.

Shortly after submitting my dissertation I won a design competition set by the Information is Beautiful group to visualize the recent financial crisis. This really helped promote myself and my work and I have spent this year working as a freelance designer on a variety of projects.

2. In 7 words or less, describe your style.

Inform through exploration.

3. If you could take a seminar with one designer or artist, dead or living, who would that be? Why?

Getting a chance to speak with Florence Nightingale would be really fascinating, her diagrams depicting deaths throughout the Crimean War were incredibly advanced for the time and her belief that the visual presentation of statistics could change the world was really forward thinking. She would no doubt be keen to see how this practice has developed over the last century and a half, and I’m sure that given a little Mac tuition she would be producing new and revolutionary pieces in no time.

4. What’s your favorite color? Why?

I don’t think I could possibly single out a favorite, certainly not when the visual display of data is concerned anyway. I make selections based on the subject and data involved and usually limited my palette to a few bold colors that I hope will command attention, engage the reader, and help communicate the data in the best possible way.

5. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your work and what did you learn from it?

Earlier this year I created a piece to highlight voting patterns between countries in the Eurovision Song Contest over the last decade. I usually avoid using Wikipedia for obvious reasons, however it was much easier to acquire the data from here than it was from the European Broadcasting Union’s website. After completing the graphic I noticed there were some incorrect data entries, and sure enough I traced the problem back to Wikipedia. I spent the next few days manually checking every single entry on the graphic against the official source to ensure all were accurate. The lesson of course is to spend longer preparing the data in the early stages to avoid lengthy delays later on, and only use sources you trust completely.

6. What about your biggest achievement? Tell us about the project you are most proud of in your career so far.

The final piece I created while pursuing my MA degree was a visualization of my life to date, including a retrospective view of my happiness at various stages. This piece has generated more interest than any other visualization I have produced so far, and it was even displayed alongside work from Nicholas Felton and David McCandless at ExpoViz 2012, a public exhibition celebrating data visualization held in Paris back in June. It was fantastic traveling all that way to see my work displayed alongside iconic pieces that actually inspired me to follow this career path not so long ago.

In that same month, another MA Design piece, showing my food consumption and body mass, was featured on the front cover of a special infographic edition of IdN, an international graphic design journal. There’s something really satisfying about seeing your work in print that digital media will never be able to replicate.

7. Who should we feature in this space next?
Paul Butt, I love his style and appreciate the attention to detail in his work.

Name: Karyn Lurie Rossen
Age: 32
Together with her husband Brandon, Karyn started Hot Butter Studio in February 2012 when she realized that she wanted to focus on creative concept development and infographic design.
Find her on Visual.ly: Hot Butter Studio

1. Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get into design, and how long have you been doing it?
I grew up on the mean streets of Caulfield in Melbourne, and I went to the school of hard knocks (it was private), before attending Melbourne Uni where I got a degree in Law. I moved to Washington DC, and gave up what would have been a lucrative career with financial security, to go the Art Institute of Washington DC and become a freelance designer. Now I’m back in Melbourne with a studio in South Yarra, and a partner at Hot Butter.

2. In 7 words or less, describe your style.
Same same same me same same same

3. If you could take a seminar with one designer or artist, dead or living, who would that be? Why?
Picasso, because he seems like the kinda person that I might have bumped into in the lobby and got to talking and decided we would skip the seminar.  I think there is the most to be learned from those who aspire to do things differently, plus it’s harder to be the best at something everyone is doing, but if you’re the only one doing it, BOOM, you’re the best.

4. What’s your favorite color? Why?
That’s like having a favorite kid, I love them all the same, but green more.

5. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your work and what did you learn from it?
Don’t quote over the phone…especially if you’re driving. You will forget what you said, you will under-quote the project, it never ends well. Put it in writing, have a think about it, a 30-second convo can end up losing you 2 grand, resist the urge to ballpark the price, just tell them you’ll have a think about it and send them over an estimate when you’re back at the computer.

6. What about your biggest achievement? Tell us about the project you are most proud of in your career so far.
Probably winning the spelling Bee in year 7, that was tough, o-n-o-m-a-t-o-p-o-e-i-a. Professionally it would have to be my Lego infographic, of anything I have worked on that project has had legs, people still tweet about and email me about, which is great for a project that came about because we were having a slow week, and decided to spend some time on personal projects.  And I think because it wasn’t commissioned and just something that we came up with, it was extra special. It was just something we did to be fun, and having so many appreciate it, it’s like winning the spelling bee all over again.

7. Who should we feature in this space next?
Column Five. They are consistently awesome.

Not part of the Visually Marketplace yet? Click here to learn more about joining!

Name: Boris Benko
Age: 36
Graphic designer for the past 15 years.
Find him on Visual.ly: borisbenko
 

1. Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get into design, and how long have you been doing it?
I come from Zagreb, Croatia and I have been working as a graphic designer for 15 years. Through my professional experience I have developed my life-long passion for information graphics, data visualization and visual identity design. Graduated in 2001 from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, I became a member of the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts, taking over various posts at leading Croatian newspapers, magazines and expert publications. Continuously expanding on my work, I caught the attention of many important clients abroad (such as Forbes, IBM, Mashable, The Huffington Post…) making my way to prestigious publications, both in printed and online editions.

2. In 7 words or less, describe your style.
Clean, informative & simple!

3. If you could take a seminar with one designer or artist, dead or living, who would that be? Why?
H. R. Giger, definitely! Because he created the alien! ☺

4. What’s your favorite color? Why?
Although every scientist would say black is not a color, every artist will claim completely differently! I love its depth, power and a sense of mystery. My favorite color!

5. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your work and what did you learn from it?
This happened 12 years ago, in the (Macromedia) Freehand era, while I had been working on the specific infographic for a real estate magazine cover. Being forced by short deadlines and troubled by the lack of inspiration I decided to take a short cut. So I started combining object over object, lens over lens, over gradient, with a lot of ‘paste inside’ commands… (finally exported it to EPS file for press) which was obviously too much for my poor, old FreeHand, but I didn’t realize it at the time! The next day, I saw the printed edition of a magazine and was shocked. Some of the graphic elements ‘jumped out’ from its frames, and the whole header was covered by undefined lines, objects… really terrible! And so on… in at least 50,000 copies! What I’ve learned was: always be able to organize yourself and your designing process; no matter how tight the deadlines are, never use short cuts; and finally, always try to keep things as simple as possible!

6. What about your biggest achievement? Tell us about the project you are most proud of in your career so far.
It’s hard to tell, since there were so many projects in the last 15 years, but recently I’ve embraced upon a new challenge, with my latest project InfographicBox, which I’m very proud of. InfographicBox is designed to get the most out of data visualization projects, as demonstrated with various works (my own production) exhibited in the CaveBull section on the website.

7. Who should we feature in this space next?
I would definitely like to see a great Italian infographic designer Francesco Franchi featured here in the future.

Not part of the Visually Marketplace yet? Click here to learn more about joining!

 
Name: Kyla Tom
Age: 25
Has been designing infographics (among other things) for the past two years
Find her on Visual.ly: kylatomdesign
 
1. Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get into design, and how long have you been doing it?

Since I can remember I have been drawing. My mother would give me and my sisters blank sheets of paper and we would spend hours drawing. I always knew I would do art of some form, but I dabbled in Fine Arts in college before I discovered Graphic Design. I had heard it was a good way to create art and make a living, but most of all Graphic Design allowed me to bring art into everyday life and I loved the idea of that. After bouncing around a few design programs, I found one that really fit and got my degree from Portland State University here in Oregon. I got my degree about two and a half years ago and I have been designing for a company in-house as well as freelancing ever since.

2. In 7 words or less, describe your style.

Fun, cheeky, and clean. Look at that, I did it in three words!

3. If you could take a seminar with one designer or artist, dead or living, who would that be? Why?

This is a toughie… I find that most of my inspiration comes from design firms and those groups of people who consistently create wonderful work. I love Sandstrom Partners in Portland, OR because their packaging design always wows me. They really hit the nail on the head when it comes to bringing the product’s message across and they do it in a very beautiful and simple way. If they ever had a seminar, I would be all over that.

4. What’s your favorite color? Why?

I love red. Always have, always will. It is so vibrant, warm, and playful.

5. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your work and what did you learn from it?

When I was still in college my whole grade rested on a final group project. We were making a poster for a Jazz Festival and printed it out around 11pm the night before it was due (that right there is a mistake… never wait until the night before to print a project. ever.). I took the poster home and found that the main word was in the wrong font. It defaulted to Myriad Pro regular rather than Helvetica Bold and it did not fit the rest of the piece whatsoever. I wracked my brain all night trying to figure out how to fix it and ended up waiting outside the printers until they opened and begged them to take pity on me and re-print it. Fortunately, they had no big print jobs that day and they printed it. It got done 5 minutes before my class started. Yikes. The moral of the story: always, ALWAYS check the print before you leave the printers and package all your fonts so you know the printer will have them.

6. What about your biggest achievement? Tell us about the project you are most proud of in your career so far.

There are many projects that are close to my heart and quite a few that have been stepping stones for me. As silly as it sounds, however, I am very proud of my “mr. Poo” infographic right here on Visually. For once I got to design an infographic about something really fun (some of my coworkers disagree with me there) and informative as well. It was great to take on the challenge of making the topic of proper digestion interesting and fun, rather than have it cue the gag reflex. I had a lot of fun and freedom designing it and my coworker Cody did a fantastic job writing the script.

7. Who should we feature in this space next?

Choices, choices… I personally love the work of Column Five Media. It isn’t just one person, since it’s a firm, but I absolutely love their work.

Not part of the Visually Marketplace yet? Click here to learn more about joining!

The Economist Group and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) are hosting an infographic challenge with the help of Visual.ly! Create your own infographic using data from this just-released report and email it in by October 31 for a chance to have it featured on PEJ’s website, The Economist’s Tumblr, Pinterest, and Facebook pages (over 1 million fans), and The Economist’s Graphic Detail blog.

More about the challenge

PEJ has written a comprehensive report on the survey findings and prepared their own infographic, which you can see by clicking the link on the right. Now PEJ and The Economist Group want to know: How would you tell the story visually? What findings jump out at you that deserve an infographic of their own? Your infographic could relate to revenue findings, the differences between Android and Apple news users, the time of day different people use their devices, facets of the app-browser debate, or something else.

More about the data

The data comes from a comprehensive new study conducted by PEJ in collaboration with The Economist Group that looks at news consumption on mobile devices. You can find the data in the file to the right. For the study, PEJ surveyed 9,513 U.S. adults about their overall activities on tablets and smart phones and then in greater detail about their news consumption on these devices ñ where they are, at what times, whether they prefer web browsers or apps, and their feelings about advertisements and paying for news.
This year’s research is a follow-up on a study released by PEJ in October 2011, also in collaboration with The Economist Group, which looked at tablet news consumption among the earliest adopters . This year’s study adds smartphones and probes habits more deeply.

For more information and to get started, Visit the Challenge Page!

If you like the Visual.ly blog and would like to support us, please vote here. Thank you!

More importantly, however, we’d like to take this opportunity to ask you, the readers, what you think of the blog. We’ve been working hard to help the community of designers, developers, journalists, and data researchers within the data visualizations and infographics fields, and we’d like to know how we’re doing. We’d love to get your thoughts on the type of content you like (or dislike!) most and what we could do to improve the blog. Would you like to see more educational and best-practices blog posts? How about featuring specific works — and the process behind them? Do you like our chalk charts?

Write to us at blog@visual.ly and tell us what you think. And if you’re a data visualization professional and would like to be featured on our blog, whether with a blog post about a specific project of yours or around a more general topic, be sure to let us know!

These days, it’s easier than ever to integrate infographics into advertising campaigns. And today, you’ll find the first of our branded infographics, Amstel Light’s “The Complex Tale of You,” soon to be followed by infographics from Kelly Services (a resume maker), Verizon, CBS, and others.

The Amstel Light infographic is specifically designed to complement Amstel Light’s Savor Complexity campaign and highlights the Complex Tale of the brand’s Facebook fans. It automatically analyzes Amstel Light fans’ Facebook data, included personal interests, events attended and people tagged, to produce the infographic.

Just as with the original Visual.ly Create, you simply connect and click to produce a beautiful infographic. We think you’ll like the fun and useful new designs our designers have come up with. And, with Kelly Services’ resume maker, you’ll find an entirely new functionality.

Our branded infographics provide new ways for brands to tell their stories and deliver customized experiences for their audiences. Visual.ly Create for Brands is powered by Visual.ly’s proprietary web-based platform that separates design from data wrangling and makes it easy for designers to create visual stories that leverage common APIs and other data. The tools allow brands to create plug-and-play infographics that encourage consumers to interact with the brand online and discover the story their social media data tells. It works with any data feed or API, not just Twitter and Facebook

Visual.ly Create for Brands provides a new way for brands to support their social media or advertising campaigns through the production of immediately shareable content.

Each graphic submitted in the Olympics category competed for a medal in the following categories:

• Storytelling
• Data wrangling
• Aesthetics
• All-Around
• Interactivity

There were some great submissions, and there were several close races. Here are the results:

 

Storytelling

What are Your Chances of Becoming a Summer Olympic Athlete? doesn’t tell a specific story, but it does connect directly with the individual story of practically everyone who reads it. We’ve all played in some sort of sports before, and it does a great job of showing us our own chances at Olympic glory.

Browse more infographics.

How to Set the World on Fire: The Logistics of Torching a Marathon is far from the prettiest of graphics, but it does tell the story of the Olympic flame through history.

Learn about infographic design.

Men’s 100M Freestyle Records is another indirect story teller. With margins so slim, it hints at tense moments that seem to last an eternity during the event, despite only lasting seconds.

by iCharts.Learn about data visualization tools.

Data Wrangling

Hugo Sanchez’s London 2012 Olympic Venues Series takes the gold on this one. The data for the illustrations is all from architecture, involving spatial information, component counts, dimensions, colors, textures, and more.
Olympic Park
Aquatics Center
Basketball Arena
Velodrome
Copper Box
Olympic Stadium

Learn about infographic design.

Power The Games Live has already been featured on the Visual.ly blog, because they do some amazing work on the backend to pull together all the data needed for their real-time power consumption visualization.

Learn about business intelligence tools.

Olympics Medal Winners does a great job of showing different angles of a fairly complex dataset.

Browse more data visualization.

Aesthetics

Olympia may not be the most useful visualization, but it definitely is beautiful.

Browse more infographics.

Team USA Hometown Map may look like a hairball, but it is an attractive hairball.

Browse more infographics.

Ancient Olympics has some really beautiful hand illustrations. Its level of hand work is rare in infographics, but it certainly pulls it off well.

Learn about data visualization tools.

All-Around

The Rising of Olympic Mountains was also featured here on the Visual.ly blog for it’s simplicity and comprehensiveness.

Learn about data visualization tools.

The Physics Of Olympic Bodies does a great job of highlighting how it takes all types to win an Olympic medal.

Learn about data visualization tools.

Every Ball Of The 2012 Summer Games has a really unique take on the games, showing the relative sizes of balls used in the sports.

Learn about data visualization tools.

Interactive

Emoto 2012 takes interactivity to the extreme, by being based on tweets, users can both interact with and drive the visualization.

Learn about data visualization tools.

Where They Started uses cartograms, and although they may be questionable, they produce some really amazing transitions in an interactive piece.

Browse more infographics.

Interactive Medals Table shows a series of data in a table. Ordinarily this is not great, but they have made the table interactive, so you can drive a visualization of medals in different sports.

Browse more data visualization.

Congratulations to the winners!

Browse more Olympics infographics.

With a truly international team here at Visual.ly, we all enjoy a little friendly competition between our home countries. We definitely contribute to the positive emotions in Emoto 2012, and we’d like to fill the category with more visualizations like it.

Browse more data visualizations.

We’re looking to fill the category with some really great visualizations, and we’d love your submissions. We’ll be watching the category for great submissions, some of which we will feature right here on the blog, with their own post about the creation process and with some thoughts from their designers.

Browse more Olympics infographics.

At the end of the games, we’ll hold a judging session for all of the graphics in the Olympics category. We will pick three winners (gold, silver, bronze) for each of these categories:

• Storytelling
• Data wrangling
• Aesthetics
• Overall
• Interactivity

We will feature the winners in a blog post, with some thoughts on why they were selected — what they did best, and what (if anything) could be improved.

Let the Visual.ly Olympics Begin!

Without further ado, here are the winners:

1. Dana Ng squeaked into first place with this great static infographic about cancer: Cancer Anyone? The graphic tells a great story, has a good flow, and overall high quality graphic design. Dana will receive a license for Tableau Desktop, a ticket to Strata Conference + Hadoop World, and $500 to help with travel expenses for the conference.

Browse more infographics.

2. Missing first by just one point, Susie Lu and Anson Chu put together a great interactive (with some chart advice from Bob Monteverde) on USA Health Care Reform and Spending. They will win $200 towards an ebook reader of their choice.

Browse more data visualizations.

3. Third was also just one point behind. Chris Nabors put together a great interactive (aside from the initial donut charts with too many sections) about US Natality. Chris gets a signed copy of I Love Charts: The Book by Jason Oberholtzer, as well as a copy of Show Me How by Derek Fagerstrom and Lauren Smith, and Listomania curated by Mariah Bear.

Browse more data visualizations.

4. Fourth was also a close one, and does a really great job with data analysis. Stephanie Vatz created an interactive map detailing America’s Worst Nursing Homes. To recognize the great data work that Stephanie did, Strata has thrown in a bonus prize: Stephanie will receive a pass to the new Strata Rx Conference.

Browse more data visualizations.

5. Terri Bleeker seems to be a track fan with her infographic covering Youth Track Injuries

Browse more infographics.

6. Bulat Beksultanov unfortunately used a radial bar chart, but otherwise created a great graphic about Sexually Transmitted Disease Morbidity.

by bulatus.Browse more Health infographics.

7. Mamta Chudasama and Shantanu Dixit created an infographic that does a good job of telling a story about Community Health Status.

Browse more Health infographics.

8. Vivekanandan Mathivanan created a good static infographic on Healthy Aging.

Browse more Health infographics.

9. Ralph Lin loves stacked area charts and used three of them in Off Label Drug Use.

Browse more Health infographics.

10. Manya Gupta took an icon approach to US Health Care Expenditures.

by mg2011.Browse more data visualizations.

There were lots of great submissions, and plenty of good visualization work went into these. Ranking the submissions was a difficult job and there were some contentions among the judges, showing how different qualities of a visualization can all be important.

Keep your eye out for the next Visual.ly contest, we’ve got some great ideas brewing!