A picture of health

I've recently started a new job in London at the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal). It's a new role they've created for an interactive data graphics designer. I'll be making graphics, mostly in Processing to begin with, which will be collected in a free archive on the BMJ site. Since my first interactive has just gone online, I thought I'd put up a quick development post about it. Those of you familiar with the development posts on this blog will recognise the workflow I've been using - starting with pencil sketches and using these to discuss ideas with subject experts, then working up the graphic in Illustrator. However, as I'm doing more interactive graphics from now on, I've been learning to use Processing . This means that I've had to make changes to the workflow, adding in a quick and dirty functionality test so that I can iron out issues before committing myself to the design. I started this project as I do with many o

I've just finished an interesting project on urban sustainability, showing how different greenhouse gas reduction policies in cities around Europe and China could affect health and wellbeing. I was working for the URGENCHE project (Urban Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in China and Europe), funded by the EU under FP7. As part of the project, I wanted to draw some Sankey diagrams to show the different energy flows in the cities. The academics in Stuttgart had already drawn a very detailed Sankey diagram using eSankey! Which was a great starting point for me. Also, of course, all the technical data collection had been done, and they provided me with all the raw numbers in Excel format. I wanted to make the diagram a bit clearer though. It needed to be quicker to understand so that policy-makers in the city could see at a glance what the different scenarios and cities would be like. Also, the text needed to be legible on a powepoint slide or an A4 report page.

On Monday, I released a new graphic which gives an overview of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is intended to introduce the viewer to the contents and structure of the Summary for Policymakers. Section B covers the different chapters of the main report. The full hi-res version is available here: http://www.ecehh.org/news/ipcc-climate-change-graphic/

It was once again a great pleasure to be invited over to Norway to work with the students at Gjøvik University College for a day's workshop last week. In the same way as last year, I set up a survey to ask them questions about themselves, and tasked them with creating A3 posters to visualise data about their whole year group. Again, I was really impressed with how far they got in just a few hours. The posters This group focussed on colours - hair colour, eye colour and favourite colour (represented by the clothing). From the original sketch, they worked up two different treatments. I love the idea of the eye pie chart. The two different hair treatments both work too. It may be difficult to see the exact proportions with different coloured hair in the left had one, but I think it gives a good overall impression. The group explained that they didn't have time to do what they wanted with the jumper colours in the left hand diagram (as in the sketch). The labelling i