5 years, 5 posts, part 4: infographic
2011 April 2
Interpreting five years of Modern Alchemy with words is fine, certainly. (I hope.) But I think this little project would feel incomplete, somehow, if I didn’t come up with one of my signature information graphics as well.
It took a little while, but I’ve done so. Gaze upon the epic sweep of five years in the life of a Cleveland-based freelancer and his design business, magnificently re-created with basic typography and simulated soap bubbles.
This will only get more interesting as the years advance
This should be pretty self-explanatory, but, just because I’m a pedant:
- Years are from April 5 to April 4, rather than calendar years.
- Bubbles indicate more-or-less business-related developments, with client/project activities in bold.
- Small, black type outside of bubbles records personal events.
- Bold, white type in the background provides some context of what was going on in the world at large, or at any rate in the larger world perceived from northeast Ohio.
- I didn’t exhaustively research this, or exercise absolute precision in placing events within a given year. Be at peace.
Anywho, that should pretty well wrap up the business of looking back at years one through five; come back on Monday for a look ahead to: the future.
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Interesting idea: personalized infographics. You know, you could actually set some kind of program to automate something like this. Just have users type in their own events with dates and maybe some kind ranking, and the computer spits out something like this. You could have relevant background info already in place, so it would basically just drop in the white bubbles. Seriously, I think that could be a really cool little Flash piece or something that I’m betting would generate a fair amount of traffic.
Also, I’m randomly amused by “China” being an undercurrent over the whole chart. 🙂
Yeah, that might well be entertaining, if a bit beyond the scope of my current abilities.
As for “China,” yeah well, the “context” items are mostly things I remember standing out in some way from the normal background chatter of news. It sure seems like we went through a stretch in recent years when every third story was, not even so much about China, really, as just another restatement of “hey, China is really important now!”
I hadn’t thought about it, but that’s probably what feels, to me, like it eventually peaked and has since subsided a bit. I guess western media have finally absorbed the novel situation of China being a major economic power and more or less “normalized” coverage again.