Baby on Visual Cinnamon

Creating the Scientific American “Baby Spike” visual

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On the Graphic Science page of the July edition of Scientific American you could find three large circular charts about when babies are born. In this blog, let me take you along on the data & designs process that me, Zan Armstrong & Jen Christiansen went through to create this piece.

The Baby Spike

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 13:39:08 +0000

Charts often aggregate across time to simplify the numbers. Instead, for this visual made for Scientific American, the focus has been on visualizing the number of babies born across different time frames; from weeks down to the minute, to reveal the role of scheduling & intervention in births. Nuanced insights about data design, visual form, and graphic design resulted in these unique charts that compare the birth of babies to the average. And people have much more influence than expected!

The top 10 babynames

Sun, 24 May 2015 16:24:54 +0000

Each year almost 4 million babies are born in the US. Although thinking of 4 million unique names is pretty difficult, theoretically it is not impossible. Nonetheless, there are always many babies given the same name. For example, in 2013 more than 18,000 boys were named Noah and more than 21,000 girls named Sophia, the most popular boy and girl name of that year. The top 10 baby names since 1880 shows the top 10 names given to babies per year and per gender since 1880. You can investigate any of the ±50 and 90 unique boy and girl names, respectively, that have entered the top 10 in the last 135 years and see their rise and fall.