This one’s been a long time coming let me tell you! It’s been sat on my computer finished for almost two weeks now, and I feel really good it’s finally published, like a weight’s been lifted.
This visual was pretty much focused on the relationships created between headlines, authors, pages, and categories. I wanted to see how much of a mess the relationships could make if they were all surrounding one container (like the square graphs we drew as children, linking adjoining sides by straight lines to create beautiful symmetrical perspectives). It’s pretty easy to work out. The only thing you might need to know is that the weight of the lines are proportionate to the word count of each story. Sticky icky yummy yummy!
The Series
This is one day in a series that takes the news from one week of the Guardian newspaper, and visually represents it as a series of static visualisations. You may also be interested in:
- Monday - A typographic and layout based piece previewing the contents of the paper as ingredients.
- Tuesday - A list of headlines contained in the paper illustrated with references to the article or subject.
- Wednesday - A polar graph inspired layout mapping the stories and categories on colour coded concentric circles.
- Thursday - A content map showing the relationships between information inside of a circular container.
- Friday - A text heavy piece highlighting the sheer amount of information contained within in the paper.
- Saturday - A grid based typographic piece, showing patterns and author relationships through the paper.
14 Comments
hey, not related, but can you please tell me how you put the text around the circle. i cant seem to get it in photoshop right. please do let me know. i have looked everywhere but couldnt find any solution.
thankyou very very much.
Alec,
I don’t think there’s a one click solution to this. How I did it was to use angle math in Illustrator.
360 degrees / total amount of items you wish to place around the circle = individual item angle. Then you just rotate the item around by the angle, multiplying it by the number of the spoke you wish to rotate.
thankyou very much for your speedy reply. but i am very new to illustrator. wondering if u could write a small tutorial for it.
Do all the math and write it down. Then select the element you wish to rotate, and go to Object>Transform>Rotate, and type in the angle you have already worked out. Do this for all the items you wish to rotate, adding the angle together twice to rotate the second object, three times for the third, four times etc etc…
Sorry I can’t write a full tutorial, but if you need more help go to TutorialBlog.org and see if they have anything for you.
Wow, thats very cool. We have an upcoming post about visual data collection, wish I would have found this before.
Thanks Patrick. I’m sure you’re upcoming post will survive without my little effort! :)
Hello, I came across your work on visualcomplexity.com. Beautiful stuff. My boss and I recently collaborated on a book that had a number of conceptual line drawings scattered throughout. One of them was a wheel of words, not entirely unlike yours, albeit totally different in concept and printed in silver and gold on black paper.
Alec, this is how I created my version. For the “word-wheel” I determined how many items and thus how many spokes I wanted in the wheel. In Illustrator, I drew a straight line with the pen tool. I then duplicated and rotated the line at even intervals along a central axis, created all the spokes. After that, I drew a circle from the center outward to the point where I wanted lines of type to begin. I then separated the circle and spoke paths using the Pathfinder. Using the type on path tool (I don’t know the exact name), I placed the cursor over the beginning of each line and typeset the words. It takes some fiddling to get used to that tool (I had just upgraded to CS3), but I eventually got it to work. http://www.kuhlmannleavitt.com/project.php?project_id=101
Thanks Matt.
I’ve seen similar things like this before, most done with processing or flash with the graphics not given as much attention as the method. With all my work I try to focus on the structure and coordination of the information, and having beautiful graphics to be able to carry that info and present it in the right way.
That is sick. Data visualization FTW.
Yes. Yes it is.
Very nice work. Any way we could get the actual poster as an inspiration for the office?
Samin,
I’ve just set up a page which has information about buying prints, so yes, I’d love to send you something for your office walls.
Are you still selling prints?
The link listed above no long works.
Xe-Meme,
I’m all out of prints at the moment. I’m possibly going to print another batch in a couple of months if there’s enough demand.
Subscribe to the site and I’ll keep you updated.