We recently had the honor of working with Outdoor Life Magazine in creating the illustrations for, “The Deer Depression,” article in their September 2011 issue. Dr. Grant Woods is a widely respected wildlife biologist whose work sends him around the country. He assesses the health of Deer Country from three different altitudes: the “satellite view,” which is a broad look at the macroscopic trends across entire regions; the “helicopter view,” which can evaluate conditions on a specific property; and his “shoelace view” from the ground.
While some deer hunters believe to have never had it so good — with multiple doe tags and giant bucks — a number of leading indicators: coyotes, mountain lions, and commodity prices chewing up deer habitats, suggest whitetail deer numbers are heading towards a decline. Dr. Woods and other leading biologists are seeking more active deer management, aggressive predator control, better disease monitoring, more focused habitat conservation and more proactive population assessment to help solve the “Deer Depression.” See the entire spread from Outdoor Life Magazine below.
We recently had the honor of contributing to Google’s Think Quarterly publication. The infographic design is based on data from the Happy Planet Index 2.0, first published in 2009. The Index was developed by statistician Nic Marks, and started as a way to create a better alternate indicator for GDP. Marks explains that, “thinking that GDP isn’t a very good measure for societal progress, the idea of the Happy Planet Index was to create a vision of how success for a nation should be judged — through sustainable happiness — then to create an indicator that showed progress towards that.”
The innovation of the Index is to examine the correlation between happiness and sustainability. Life expectancy measures objective years, the concept of happy life years reflects the fact that it’s no use creating good lives now at the expense of future generations. “We need to think about the cost of creating those good lives,” says Marks, “and that’s where the ecological footprint comes in.”
The Index gathered data on life expectancy, ‘happy life years’ and ecological footprint, then crunched it together to rank countries by how efficiently they created wellbeing among their people. See the entire layout from the publication below.
Read on…
A solid idea is the essential foundation of a great infographic. While this may sound obvious, it is the most common mistake made by companies developing infographics today, leading to a slew of poorly thought-out visual disasters. I aim to spotlight a few of these pitfalls, to help you first recognize what you are trying to do, then identify the types of ideas that will help you achieve it. Read on…
They say knowledge is power, but how do we make knowledge powerful? The challenge of communicating information becomes especially difficult when trying to convey a message full of complex data, which is often difficult to interpret quickly and clearly to the naked eye. This motion graphic looks at some of the many visual techniques used by Column Five to communicate information effectively to a large audience. Read on…
An ongoing discussion at Column Five HQ is ”What if social media manifested itself in real life?” It’s a question that addresses much of our personal and professional lives and can be characterized as constant noise, new trends, and the occasionally absurd, among other things. And while most of our commentary tends to evolve into abstract tangents, we decided to focus on one application of the hypothesis. We settled on the idea of “What if you lived in an apartment building with social media?”, but that proved to be a mouthful. So we simplified this title to “What if social media sites were your neighbors?” Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.
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