Cool Infographics interviews Jess Bachman, owner of WallStats.com and creator of the popular Death & Taxes posters, and they discuss some of the creation of this popular poster.
Cool Infographics: What software applications do you use for the Death & Taxes posters?
Jess Bachman: The only applications I use are Photoshop and Excel. Excel is where I in put all the data and it crunches the numbers, adjusts for inflation and calculates diameters. Photoshop is where I put it all together and the PSD file occasionally exceeds 1 gig so it can be a beast to work with. Saving takes about 5 minutes.
Cool Infographics: What’s your design process?
Jess Bachman: Normally I start from scratch and layout the images and make them fit; however, this year the budget didn’t change all that much, likely being from the same President, so I was able to keep the 2010 format and change the size of circles. Of course some things had to be added and removed. So this year I saved myself about 3 weeks of work just getting right into it, but the design process is grueling. it’s small tasks, repeated 500 times.
Also, CoolInfographics is having a contest to give away a free print of the poster.
Yes this has been corrected.
http://www.deathandtaxesposter.com/
it was missing a 7, so its 77 billion.
@
seanahern Good Catch.. I brought it up to him (@mibi on twitter), maybe he’ll respond.
Neat. Jess Bachman mentioned liking that ORNL folks put his poster on the big EVEREST powerwall. The guy who did that was Jamison Daniel, one of my visualization staff members.
Looking at the 2011 poster, it appears the number for the Department of Transportation is incorrect, though the diameter looks to be correct.