Entry for a competition to rethink the food label. My main gripe with the current label design is that it assumes you will remember the percentages of nutrients you eat throughout an entire day. This design attempts to show percentages per meal (with three meals a day) to make a food’s value more clear. To demonstrate, which value seems like a healthier percentage of calories: 40% daily value or 120% meal value? They are the same, but 40% daily value doesn’t seem as that bad. Other entries in this competition can be seen here.

This is my attempt at a radiation dosage chart in response to a couple others that have been posted recently.

Randall Munroe of XKCD posted the widely circulated chart below. In it, the relationships within each section are very clear: you can easily see how eating a banana compares to a cross-country flight (two blue boxes vs. 320 blue boxes). However, in order to compare eating a banana to severe radiation poisoning, that relationship isn’t as direct. You must follow the size conversions from blue boxes to green boxes to red boxes since there is no immediate relationship.

(click to enlarge)

David McCandless of Information is Beautiful also created a radiation dosage chart, shown below. Visually it is easier to navigate, as it lists each dosage vertically in sequence. The tradeoff here is that there isn’t an accurate visual relationship between the numbers. There is as much space between .4 microsieverts to 1 microsievert as there is between 50 millisieverts to 100 millisieverts. The color shifts also vary in their relationship to dosage. In the space of .9 microsieverts, the color shifts from yellow to green. A similar shift in color from blue to purple though, spans 90 millisieverts.

(click to enlarge)

In my version (top), the goal was to show a clear relationship between the smallest and largest dosage. In order for that chart to fit on one screen/page, I needed to visualize doses using volume. I also aimed to make the color relationships consistent. To do this I used a gradient from yellow to red and plotted all the points from zero to 8,000 millisieverts. As a result, there is minimal color shift between the smaller doses, and significant jumps between the larger ones. I had to make tradeoffs as well. It was a struggle to find a size that kept all the doses at least somewhat visible while aiming to fit the whole image (or most of it) on one large screen. This affected how the captions were displayed and how many dosage examples I could show.

Notes: All my data was aggregated from David and Randall’s charts, with the addition of the TSA blog. Keep in mind there is some controversy (via DF) about the backscatter emission tests.

I had been playing with alternative (and possibly inaccessible) ways to visualize music notation, and came up with this. Theoretically, someone could play the melody from this single line if they knew the first note, though reading the subtle differences in radius would be a challenge. I may experiment with other songs in the future, but here is one for the holidays:

Because the primary input method of the iPad is a single piece of multitouch glass, developers have incredible flexibility to design unique user interfaces. It’s hard to appreciate the variety of UIs though, since turning the screen off removes virtually all evidence of them. To spotlight these differences, I looked at the only fragments that remain from using an app: fingerprints.

My method involved cleaning the iPad’s surface with a microfiber cloth, using an app for a short amount of time, then turning the screen off. Next, I photographed the iPad, positioning a light source and some black matte board to limit distracting reflections. I then brought the photographs into Adobe Illustrator, and created vectors of the iPad and the fingerprints to emphasize the data.

Click the image for a closeup:

Notes:

In Safari, I tended to hold the iPad with my left hand and scroll with my right index finger towards the center of the screen. I realized this allowed for close proximity when clicking on links. When reading something of greater length, I usually held the the iPad with both hands and scrolled with my thumbs.

In Mail, I typically held the iPad with both hands in order to thumb-scroll both the email list and the content.

In Fruit Ninja, there were few, if any, static prints. Even the menu items are selected by slashing your finger across them.

The bottom menu is essential to Fieldrunners; most actions start from there.

If you know of other iPad apps with unique interfaces, please let me know.

With all the lawsuits piling up over the past month, I felt a revision of this graphic was needed. In this update I also included patent holding companies.

Update: Motorola fires back and Microsoft and Spansion sues Samsung.

An attempt at redesigning this chart from The Guardian to make the plaintiffs and defendants a bit more clear.

Edit: HTC has agreed to licensing terms on Microsoft’s patents and there is currently no lawsuit.

Another Edit: Updated to show Motorola’s Lawsuit targeting Apple.

Part 8 in the GOOD Magazine education series

Part 7 in the GOOD Magazine Education series.

An animated version of my infographic for GOOD magazine.

Continuation of the GOOD Magazine education series.

Another graphic created for GOOD.

A slideshow of charts designed for OnEarth Magazine

Another for GOOD.

The latest infographic for GOOD Magazine.