DATA
VISUAL-IZATION
Here you will find a small, but growing collection of data visualizations I have built using various design tools. These designs are intended to provide a visual explanation and abstraction of an idea or concept. These projects are fairly narrow and static in their output, as contrasted with interactive dashboards.
The Cost of War
This was one of the first visualizations I designed using Adobe Illustrator. To make this, I initially imported a scatter plot of this visualization using RAW Graphics, but due to size limits the proportions of the marks did not expand correctly. To remedy this I created a circle of the Civil War deaths (the highest) and scaled the sizes of the other circles relative to the civil war. Once complete, even I had to double check the data as the loss of life during the civil war was shocking. As noted in the description for this visual, the deaths captured here are only American military deaths (the easiest metric to find). Total deaths from other militaries and non-combatants would show a very different picture.
US Labor Unions
This visualization was inspired by the recent (successful) efforts to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Staton Island. Here I wanted to look at the current state of unions across the country, and how union members were advantaged over non union membership. Here we can see that unions are seriously declining, and have been for some time. This may come as surprise when you look at the income from union members when compared with non-union members. Here we see that take home pay improved with union membership... significantly. Perhaps the tide will turn on union membership in the years ahead, but for now it appears to only advantage a small minority of workers (about 10%!)
CO2 Emissions
This visualization looks at the intersection of gross emissions vs per capita emissions. Here we can see that more developed western countries emit at a rate much higher than other countries on a per capita basis. We can also see that peak emissions happened much earlier for those countries than for developing nations (who are still increasing emissions). This, I think, is an important context for understanding the challenges for making global agreements for emissions reductions. It is often wealthier developed nations whose emissions spurred climate change asking developing countries to cut emissions at the cost of their own development.
Sustainability Visualized
This is a selection of visualizations I made for my Master's thesis on Sustainability in Big Tech (the full document is available here↗). I used these visualizations to describe a wide range of topics from emissions rate, theories of morality, and sustainability practices and concepts. I found this practice very useful to distill down complex information into more understandable visuals... this also saved me a lot on the word limit that I kept running into while writing this paper!
Twitter Acquisition
Let's get this out of the way: this is not a good data visualization. The use of perspective and placement of the two bars misleads the user into judging how different the sizes are. Certainly Instagram will appear the larger mark no matter how you place it, but the general practice of 3D charts should be used.... cautiously. I used this project as a fun way to explore the perspective tool in Illustrator and working with some new fonts.
Life Changing Events
In this chart I am trying to visualize how the day-to-day events and cadence of our lives changed over the last three years. This chart is not intended to be a perfect representation of things, and indeed it is a composite and average of our daily routines. What I hope can be illuminated here is how and when our lives went through major shifts since 2019.
Meteorite Strikes
This was the first project I completed using Processing language. I built the map in a Processing sketchbook and manipulated the export file in Adobe Illustrator to show the red shadow of the marks. Using a data processing tool (rather than a BI tool) is new for me, but I hope to explore Processing applications in a number of different mediums.
