An infographic from InfographicWorld contains a mind-boggling amount of information related to the Gulf Oil Spill. Showing data as of yesterday (Thursday, May 13th), it starts with the basic “Location of Oil” graphs and “Predictions for the future” of the oil spill, but then continues to add in information on quotes from public officials and details on the response effort.
That alone would be fine, but then it goes way too far at adding information on the Top Hat, relief wells, environmental risks, a complete timeline, impacts on the fishing industry, companies involved, public opinion, offshore drilling and much much more.
This infographic really epitomizes information overload. Still, if you want to know everything about the Gulf Oil Spill as of today, this has it all in a single collection of tiny-point font. The fact that it’s a lossy JPEG doesn’t help either.
Fullsize after the break.
Click for full resolution.
I fail to understand the criticism of this graphic. This thing is EXACTLY what was needed to put this extremely complicated issue in context. Without a doubt, the absolutely most effective form of human communication is visual (after all, sight is the human form of ‘broadband’), and graphics like this help immeasurably! Is it big? Sure. Is there a lot to process? Yes. However, it allows the human brain to process large amounts of information the way it does normally: through images and visualization. As far as time constraints are concerned, I posit that most people don’t have the time to scrounge around the internet hoping to gather the various different kinds of information presented in this graphic needed to gain the same understanding of this issue this graphic imparts. This is because most people have lives to live and families to take care of. As-such, being able to go to a single place for all of this information saves me an immense amount of time (and I’m very appreciative for it). Nicely done Carol, and thanks!
Excellent Graphic!
Just what i wanted to see and MUCH MORE!
WELL DONE (no pun). 🙂
I particularly like the dot graphic at bottom and the diagonal showing the costs and the comparisons to earlier spills.
Good balance of information.
IS there one that can be printed (at a size people can read) such as “poster sized at 20×30 inches or so?
Time constraints are always a problem. People always want the best quality but have a due date of yesterday. I could easily see this one graphic being spread across several days of different infographics. The first day would have covered the causes of the accident and its impact. The second day would have covered potential solutions. The third day would have covered its impact to wildlife. &c.
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Carol Zuber-Mallison I understand time constraints, believe be 🙂 It just seems that so much of what you include would be better suited for a Text Article rather than a Graphic. Most of my criticism comes from the fact that the text is simply too small to read, compounding by JPEG’s lossy compression nature.
Is there another even higher-resolution version of this graphic somewhere? That would alleviate some of my criticisms. I mean, I’m on a 30-inch monitor and that text is TINY.
Randall:
In response to your criticism of my infographic “Crude Awakenings,” I want to point out that the intention of the graphic was to be comprehensive–to explain the whole situation to readers who were just becoming aware of the disaster and wanting to be fully informed.
Yes, there is a lot of information on it because this is one horrendously complicated disaster. The effects are profound in so many sectors with huge costs everywhere. This was not meant to be the graphic equivalent of a 15-second sound bite, but the visual equivalent of a 200-inch New York Times analysis. It’s not the cute graphic for everybody, but there is a certain thoughtful audience out there that wants “just the facts” so that they can do their own analysis without being colored by someone else’s political agenda. What you see as “information overload” is actually the goal to show all the facets of this disaster. And, if you spend time looking at the information, you’ll see that there is some method to the madness here: the immediate effects of the spill–shown in the map at the top–ripple outwards as you move down the graphic, through the environment and the economy into the political. And you’re finally left with the question at the bottom: What does this mean for our future?
I’m the first to admit that the artistic design on this is….what’s the technical word….”sucky.” There are a lot of things I would design differently if I had the time. As a graphic professional, you know that good graphic design is a thoughtful process that takes time….and that was simply not a resource available on this project. I wish I had had four weeks to work on it, but I only had four DAYS. And there wasn’t an art staff working on this, I did much of the research, all the writing and all the design and illustration. (The “lossy jpeg” was not my doing.) The accuracy of the information had to take precedence over the graphic design–but I’m from a newspaper background where that is almost always the case. There will be many oil spill graphics coming out in the next few weeks and they will be beautiful, but I hope you will appreciate that this one was done very quickly so that people could be informed at the beginning of the disaster, not weeks later.
I would hope you would soften your criticism and take the word “bad” off the keyword list. This may not have been the graphic for a busy person like yourself, but I don’t think it’s a bad piece of graphic journalism. Continue your great work showing graphics to the world, I love your website, I’m thrilled to have a graphic on it, and I’m so glad there are people like you out there on the web spreading interest in this field.
Sincerely,
Carol Zuber-Mallison
zmgraphics.com