For example, on the first game against the USA when Gerrard scored there was a period between the goal and the peak reaction when messages averaged over 3,000 per second. That’s alot of things to happen per second!

The following shows how the time expands and compacts based on the amount of traffic during each match. In the second game against Algeria you can see hardly anything got a reaction. The score was 0-0 and the match to watch wasn’t very exciting, except at the end Rooney made a comment to the camera and network traffic went crazy.

The final graph is a comparative look at the traffic over all 3 matches. We can see from this graphic when something significant happened during the match there was a traffic spike, and another at the end when the match finished.

Though the end spike was probably everyone working out which pub to go to!

What’s shown below is the updated graphic with about half hours more work on it since the submitted version for the competition. The original idea I had was to do about four visualisations looking at wealth, quality of life, culture, and size. I’d already spent time gathering and compiling the data a couple of weeks beforehand from various sources, but then other projects took priority (again) and my time lines got screwed (again!). So here’s just one: size.

How big is the USA poster

It’s a visualisation focused on showing the size of the USA compared to other countries in the world.

The process and older drafts

This is the first draft that was completed with only 5 minutes to spare before the deadline ended, using an automatically generated colour palette.

This is the second draft after I decided I hated the colours, and decided to go with a monochromatic green variant to represent the land.

This is the third draft after I decided to try and colour code everything by the dominant country’s flag colour, then gave up halfway through as I realised I was going backwards.

This is the final draft you see above. I’ve taken out the block colours and used a stronger line weight to pick out the more important areas of the visualisation. As it’s a focus on the USA, I’ve brought out the USA’s area on the pie with their customary red, white and blue colours.

…and I did try an inverted version but never really fancied it.

Now I’ll have to wait to see if my entry gets picked up by the project, and try and be cheeky and ask the organisers if they’d be so kind as to accept the updated version. I couldn’t leave it after the second draft anyhow, it just wasn’t up to spec.

I’m not going into too much detail right now until I put a little video together of how it works, but if you’re in London and you’re free tonight (February 19th 2010) then you should come along to Design Overtime at the Design Museum on the Thames. It’s going to be a great night with full open access to all the exhibits, plus the designers in residence (that includes me) will be taking over the museum. What this means I’m not sure, but my visualisation will be tracking everything, and if the weather holds out then this vis will be projected onto the outside wall of the DesMus for all to see. Should be pretty darn cool.

I’ll have plenty of pictures, video, and screencast on this after the weekend, so tell your friends! — and if you are in London and you want to come down then I have a few tickets going begging. Let me know on twitter, @davebowker or @designingnews, and you should follow me too. I like to think I’m funny. :)

The info poster below is a larger view of what was included in the supplement prototype packaging that I posted yesterday.

For each piece printed, the preview image of the storyboard (this one being the Thursday visualisation) would be the preview to what’s printed on the opposite side of the page, thereby allowing the poster to be hung either side for a more informative view, or a more visual view.

Well one idea I had was a supplement piece, with accompanying package containing a fullsize A1 print every week for six weeks. This way the One week of the Guardian project is contained in it’s own package, with accompanying information which tells the story of the project, and a poster of a piece of work to encourage people to collect the whole series.

Inside the envelope, the A1 print would be folded down to A5 size, 4 folds in half each time. Printed on the back of the visualisation for that day would be a storyboard with project information, the same for each day so that if a reader jumped on board half way through the issues, they would still know what’s going on.

A rough scale of things would look something like this.

I was thinking it might be nice to have these supplemental packages published next year on the dates they were created, as a time capture looking back one year ago using data visualisations. A hypothetical fantasy, but a nice one I think.

The idea would be that a simple application would pull headlines from the BBC News website, or any website, and seperate the headline into individual words. It would then check a database to see if there is a pictogram associated with that word and display it. This would loop for all words until the headline is complete. If there is no pictogram for the word available, then it will just display the word and update an online list that symbols for word ‘X’ are needed.

Here’s a couple of examples mocked up with stock photos to see what I’m talking about.

Pictogram Headlines
A quick concept idea for using headlines displayed as a series of pictograms. This proposal could be installed in a number of public spaces, train stations, bus depots, airports, etc. on large screen visual displays. The headlines in pictograms would cross multiple language barriers, and carry the English alternative underneath. When people are used to seeing them then they will eventually be able to quickly see the news just by using the pictures.

Anyone have any thoughts? I know I’d find it more interesting when at a train/bus station to have rotating headlines.

Todays visual plots all of the headlines in the Guardian on a grid, colour categorised and ordered as to their position in the paper. Relationships are formed for authors who appear more than once. The idea of this was to create a simple layout where patterns become apparent, where heavily coloured sections are representative of special dedicated sections within the paper, and authors can be tracked through their articles.

Incase you didn’t notice, this was more of a type based graphic. ;)

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.

Anyways, I wanted this to be a predominantly text based visual, using all of the words in the newspaper to make my point. I was inspired a little by the Beatles Poster by Daniel Eatock, and the Motorolla 75th Anniversary poster by Fibre designs. As a friend said, “it kind of throws away the idea of a 32 page paper”. After he said that it hit me that everyday some layout designer(s) has to fit all of this information into sections, sub-sections, pages, and columns. The blocked details highlight some of the more important points behind the text.

Trust me when I say, there’s alot of this text! So much infact, Illustrator nearly died at trying to draw all the vectors whenever I moved the page or zoomed in and out.

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.

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.

This visual has been modified from its original version. The logo has been amended, and introduction information has been added.

Well yet another day is complete. When there’s little distraction I really enjoy cranking these visuals out. Looking at it now, in some ways the result kind of reminds me of a ’70s pinball-esque, dark side of the moon album covered hard drive. Schweeet!

The original idea was inspired by looking at polar graphs, and figuring out a way to maximise the amount of data I could plot on it. The concentric circles are news categories, expanding from least to most total word counts per category. The individual word counts of each story are plotted on the corresponding concentric circle, on a spoke of the corresponding page. The rest I’m sure you can figure out. Pretty no?

Mmm…. Taste the rainbow!

Expandability!

As I was making this one, I was thinking that if it were pulling live data (like RSS/XML or pulling direct from some news database), it would be rather nice to tile the days. Each day is represented by one set of concentric circles, and each category in the circle is linked to its equivalent category for different days, each linking to everyone else in a parallel fashion. Mmm… linkage. Anyways, it’s just a thought.

I’m imagining a HUGE set of these static visuals on a gallery wall for one whole year. Damn that would be cool.

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.