Death & Taxes

Creative Brief

Crafted Product

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Goal

My firm, Graphicacy, creates a line of large-format, elaborate information art posters called Timeplots. With information designer Youyou Zhou, we visualized the 2016 Federal Discretionary Budget proposed by the Obama Administration. We wanted to show the budget is a reflection of our values, as evidenced by the giant circle for the Defense budget and an even larger circle for the National Debt, lurking in the background.

Role

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My roles: Art Direction, Data Visualization, Writing, Design & Production

Graphicacy: Youyou Zhou, information designer
Jess Bachmann, original design

Process

Discovery

Observations

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The original design of the poster, by Jess Bachman, offered the type of complexity Nathaniel finds appealing in our Timeplots posters. Nathaniel was able to get the rights to produce the poster from Jess. As an Art Director, I knew the poster needed to maintain the overall look-and-feel the original series. But it would need a style improvement.

The Notes below, composed by Will Merrow of Graphicacy, are relevant for this visual choices that go into the data visualizations for the poster and our plans for future posters.

Death and Taxes Notes.pdf1819.2KB

What type of charts do we want to show?

Radial/pie chart
Treemap or heatmap (perhaps arranged in an interesting shape/pattern?)
Vertical sankey/flow
Bubbles (similar to previous year)
Any chart could be accompanied by a slope chart or a bar chart to show context.
Probably don't want to do packed bubbles or a simple treemap.

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This poster had been popular in the data visualization community, and it helped people to see just how much we spend on the Defense budget (it has to be seen to be believed). We asked questions such as:

What will people buy to hang on their wall?
Can we keep the debt on the poster somehow (without being the dominant story)?

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The data comes directly from publicly available budgetary information. Youyou and I generated nested circles in an Open Source statistics and data visualization software called R to represent each departnment and agency's budget by area.

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My early Concept Sketching related to style improvements. I arranged the circles using Jess's blueprint as a guide and collected all the imagery. I believed Jess's poster needed more style unity because it had a bouquet of colors, randomly presented and based on agency logos. I limited the palette to gold and black, with duotones. Also, I explored ways to limit the way the connecting lines hooked and tried to ocnstrain their angles to quiet 30, 60, 90, and 45 degree angles. We also added in our own comparisons, making our own editorial choices.

Concepts → Blueprint

Approach

Youyou and I had an R script that parsed the budget request data.
Each department and agency was run through R to generate bubbles in a straight line.
I then hmade a master Illustrator template, took the bubbles, arranged them into the spirals, styled the labels and added the images.

Reflection

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This process proved hands-on and time intensive. Because we need a system for this posters, most of our reflection discussions were about ways to design this fasters, using data visualization tools like Tableau and D3, which is javascript-based and used for online interactives. The idea would be to make this experience interactive, online, using Scalable Vector Graphic assets. These same assets can be downloaded and opened into Adobe Illustrator to make a print poster.

My questions:

I wondered if there is an easier way to do this just using Tableau? If we agreed upon one master data file, we could make a bubble chart grid for everything, which could be re-arranged more easily.

Or D3? We have been discussing a version that would be in D3, and then we could always get SVG assets from that...