Brian Eno to judge our $30,000 data visualization awards

So we’re running the world’s first global awards, celebrating excellence in data visualizations, infographics and information art. Yeah!

Kind sponsors Kantar have laid $30,000 on the table to reward the winners and celebrate the field.

Who are the judges?

Excitingly, we’re super-honoured to welcome Brian Eno to our judging panel. He joins senior curator at the MoMA Paola Antonelli, The Guardian Datablog’s editor Simon Rogers and um, myself David McCandless.

Here’s the complete roll call. See their bios and details.


Yes, the final judge is you! We’ll be inviting you and the online infoviz community at large to vote on entries and become a single ‘meta-judge’ on our panel.

Who can enter?

It’s open to all comers – pro and ‘amateur’, individual, team or studio, media, art, corporate – whatever, where ever. This is a truly global contest.

Long- and short-listed entries will be exhibited here and on the awards site. So your work will be seen by many, many eyes. Winners will win cash prizes, a unique trophy and mondo kudos.

Where and when to enter

So if you’re making viral infographics, vizzing statistics, campaigning with data journalism, rendering geo-data, designing your company’s internal processes – submit your entry today. It costs just $10 to enter. That means it won’t cost a chunk to have your work seen and lauded.

Closing date: 31st May 2012.
Long list: 25th June 2012.
Short list: 9th July 2012.
Winners: by 31st July 2012.

Categories and prizes

Somewhat inevitably here’s an information graphic that explains all the categories and prizes.

Submit your entry today. Best of luck!

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Rhetological Fallacies

Rhetological Fallacies - Rhetorical and Logical Fallacies
A brain-blending categorisation and visualisation of errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking. How many do you use?

The word ‘rhetological’ is made up. Just so I can munge two types of entity: rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies.

Both are used heavily by institutional powers – governments, religions, political parties, across the entire spectrum to sway opinion, confuse and obfuscate. And, unfortunately, we internalise them, like bad habits, into our own decision-making and mental processes.

How many you recognise? Or use?

UPDATE 11th April: We now have a French version – and printable French PDF to download. Thanks to Gilles Peyroux!

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3D Infographic Projection Mapping in Grand Central Station!


Fancy seeing the world’s first 3D projection-mapped infographic animations?

Along with ad agency DDB London and the Financial Times, we helped gather data and shape some of the stories for three short infographic films which will be projection-mapped on the inside of Grand Central Station in New York! Go see!

(Projection-mapping throws a 3D model of an environment or space back on itself in order to pull off some incredible visual effects).

I’ve not seen the finished films yet. They’ll be unveiled tomorrow (Tuesday 27th March) and run continuously for three days. Hashtag #FTGW. But project-mapping ninjas the Klip Collective have an incredible reputation for large scale awesomeness.

There’s a preview (and a picture of me doing Karate) running at http://www.ft.com/graphicworld.

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Hollywood Visualizations

Hollywood Challenge Results - Information is BeautifulAmazing response to our Visualise Hollywood Challenge. Just in time for the Oscars!

Slice, dice and flip data on budgets, review scores and genre with these interactive visualisations.

See all the entries.

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Who Runs the World?

Who Runs The World? - Information is Beautiful
Amid collapsing currencies, financial ruin and end-days gloom, might it be useful to know who’s really steering this sinking ship?

Who’s has the power? Who’s really in charge? It could be the US. Maybe the World Bank. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the SHAPESHIFTING LIZARDS!

Our stab at understanding the world government hierarchy: the Who Runs The World Pyramid of Power.

Who have we missed?


Concept & Research: David McCandless
Design: David McCandless, Laura Sullivan
Additional Research: Alexia Wdowski
Additional design: Tatjana Dubovina, Jack Hagley
Sources: Wikipedia, Skeptic.com, Writing on the Wall: China & the West in the 21st Century

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How much does Hollywood earn?

Major anti-online piracy laws like PIPA/SOPA and ACTA are designed to protect the intellectual property of businesses like the US movie industry.

Hollywood cites yearly losses of billions of dollars to illegal internet downloads as justification for new legislation. (source, PDF)

But what do the numbers say?

US Film Industry Revenues - InformationIsBeautiful.net

See our data and calculations: http://www.bit.ly/movierevs.

(And, um, if you can supply worldwide DVD sales figures, please get in touch!)


RESEARCH & DESIGN: David McCandless
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH: Miriam Quick
SOURCE: MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA (PDF)
DATA: BIT.LY/MOVIEREVS

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Hollywood budgets – extended deadline

Hollywood Budgets - A Visualization Challenge
Well, our Information is Beautiful Awards challenge on movie budgets is proving more popular than a DVD of Juno on a wet afternoon.

We’ve had loads of great entries already. And some amazingly creative ideas are popping up.

Like, Jermone Cukier‘s explorations of the dollar value of individual features of a plot. He cross-referenced keywords for each movie on IMDb with box office return. The result? A price tag for each plot element.

Having an explosion in your film could earn you $150m, he finds. A love triangle $37m. And a psychopath – just $32m. See the list.

All this is very exciting and creative so we’re extending the closing deadline by a week.

You now have until Monday 6 February to get your ideas to us.

» Check out the challenge at InformationIsBeautifulAwards.com
» Check out the data

You can create a design, an interactive piece or even a sketch on a napkin to tell your own movie stories. The winners share a showbiz-worthy $5,000 prize-pot, thanks to kind sponsors Kantar.com.

In the meantime, why not explore this revealing snippet of data. Top 10 films for each year not by Hollywood’s favourite, gross. But by profitability, percentage of against budget, not just cash-pull. Changes the top 10 movie charts considerably…

See the data sheet in Google Docs


CONCEPT: David McCandless
SOURCES: The-Numbers.com, BoxOfficeMojo, IMDB, Wikipedia
DATA GATHERERS: Miriam Quick, Marley Whiteside, Dan Hampson, Pearl Doughty-White, Matt Hancock, Alexia Wdowski, Alex Lemon

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A Taxonomy of Ideas?

The Grades of Ideas - Information Is Beautiful
Recently, when throwing ideas around with people, I’ve noticed something. There seems to be a hidden language we use when evaluating ideas.

Neat idea. Brilliant idea. Dumb idea. Bad idea. Strange idea. Cool idea.

There’s something going on here. Each one of these ideas is subtly different in character. Each adjective somehow conveys the quality of the concept in a way we instantly and unconsciously understand.

For instance, a ‘neat’ idea is not the same as a ‘brilliant’ idea. A ‘bad’ idea is not quite the same as a ‘dumb’ idea.

But why?

I started wondering: is there an invisible language of ideas? Could there be an unseen hierarchy hidden in that language? What qualities actually make a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea? Could you visualize and plot the most popular words used to describe ideas? Would that unveil the structure? And would doing that be a ‘nice’ idea? Or a ‘terrible’ one?

I’m not sure. So, I’d like to share my first draft and invite your feedback and thoughts.


RESEARCH & DESIGN: David McCandless
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH: Kathryn Ariel Kay

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Hollywood Budgets – A $5000 Data-Viz Challenge

Hollywood Budgets - A Visualization Challenge
This might be our best dataset yet. A massive sheaf of numbers on every major Hollywood film since 2007. Their budgets, review scores, grosses, genres and profits. Just in time for the Oscars in February!

We’re challenging people to visualise this data – either in a design or an interactive piece. And, thanks to beloved sponsors Kantar, we’ve got $5000 to give away to the winners.

Best of all – you don’t need to be able to design. You can sketch your entry on a napkin.

» Check out the challenge at InformationIsBeautifulAwards.com
» Check out the data

Read More »

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The Top 21 Albums of 2011 from 120 Top 10 Lists

Top 21 Albums of 2011 from 120 Top 10 Lists
All the top-rated albums from all the top top-ten lists visualized. Try saying that with a mouthful of egg-nog. Thanks to Metacritic.com’s awesome data clumping.

Here’s nearly all of them on a single Spotify playlist.


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