Dashboard Week Day 2: Annihilation by Infographic

by Hanna Nykowska

Day 2 of the Dashboard Week and we’re tasked with creating an infographic on the Avengers! The stakes are high since the data doesn’t require any prep really unless we decide to add more data (but that’s extra…) and:

I hope one of them get Viz of the Day

Andy Kriebel

that’s just a bit more pressure to it, thanks Andy!

What’s wrong?

Well, it seems like a design challenge to me and I don’t think that is my forte, to be fair. I’m also not sure where to start apart from looking at the data. How do I actually go about creating an infographic?

Google is my friend and so I’ve found an article that describes how to create an infographic in five steps. I can only hope I’ll have enough time to go through all of them and build something good enough.

1. Goals of the inforgraphic

In other words the questions you want to answer with your infographic. Since we were given the data set I looked at what I had and what kind of questions I could ask. Tried to think of as many as I could. It’s easier to cut some things than create more you didn’t plan.

Then I thought about initial layout: which questions I’d like to answer first for the infographic to have a sensible flow and while I was doing it I started thinking about what types of charts I’d like to use:

Dashboard Plan

2. Collect the data

In this situation, I focused on which data I need from the data set and maybe if I need anything extra. (That will have to wait until I’m done with what I have thought and maybe I’ll be able to squeeze in some time for getting external data sets. Maybe.)

Data fields and my questions (also used it for step 1)

3. Visualise the data

This is the moment where I showed Andy my plan. He seemed quite pleased with the drawing and also gave me some pointers on some of the graphs.

Now back to Tableau (I used it briefly earlier to just look at the data). This was a fair chunk of my work although it took much less time than I expected looking at all of the charts I wanted to build.

4. Layout the elements

This was pretty quick, mostly because I’ve done it in my first step. I decided to plan out the containers as well. (Jon wrote quite a few posts on that, make sure to have a look!)

5. Add some style

I spent quite a bit of time on this. It’s definitely one of my favourite bits so that was just fun. Although I did need to watch out not to spend too much time on this part…

I googled Avengers for some inspiration and decided to go for a dark theme with purple and silver-like grey.

I’ve found Avengence font to create the title. Gimp also came in handy to get background of ANNIHILATION transparent. Apparently you can do it with Paint 3D but that thing is not working for me.

To finish off my dashboard, I needed to add some annotations so that it’s not just charts. This took quite some time, but was also quite fun as well.

Final Result

I’m quite happy with the final outcome. I usually go for a single chart dashboard (or just limit the number of charts as much as possible) so this was a bit of challenge for me to create a cohesive infographic with more than one chart. I usually have a light background so going for a dark theme was another thing a bit out of my comfort zone.

‘Interactive’ viz

Thanks for reading, I’ll be back tomorrow!

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Hanna Nykowska

Fri 24 May 2019

Thu 23 May 2019