Data Sketches on Visual Cinnamon

Figures in the Sky

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

No matter where you are on Earth, we all look up to the same sky during the dark nights. You might see a different section of it depending on your exact location, time & season, nevertheless the stars have fascinated humans across time and continents. Our own creativity combined with stories about local legends and myths have created a diverse set of different constellations. And even though the stars don’t change, people have found many different shapes in the same sky. This interactive visual story looks into the differences & similarities between the constellations that 28 cultures, spread across time and across the World, have seen in the stars.

An Ode to Cardcaptor Sakura

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 14:52:04 +0000

Cardcaptor Sakura is one of the most beautiful and adorable manga series ever created and this project is my ode to the wonderful series. CCS was written and illustrated by the manga artist group CLAMP between 1996 and 2000, but is still extremely popular today. This visualization brings together several different aspects of the series; the main characters, the chapters, relationships and the wonderful cover art of each of the 50 chapters. By visually connecting these different aspects of Cardcaptor Sakura, fans can get a more nuanced understanding of the events that happen throughout the series.

A talk on lessons learned from data sketches

Sat, 14 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A blog about the new solo talk I’ve created recently that revolves all around Data Sketches, the dataviz collaboration I’m (still) doing together with Shirley Wu. In this talk I (but also we) discuss the lessons that we’ve already learned from doing 10 months of creating an elaborate data visualization a month.

Breathing Earth

Wed, 24 May 2017 10:33:57 +0000

We all know that our Earth goes through a seasonal cycle, especially for the latitudes farther away from the equator. In the fall the “deciduous” plants lose their leaves only to grow back again in the next spring. The animation happening in “Breathing Earth” shows how 50.000 circles move through all 52 weeks of 2016 and visualize the seasonal cycles. Thereby displaying the how vegetation health changes throughout the year and how plant growth & decline occur on different times and scales in the many regions across the Earth.

Beautiful in English

Wed, 24 May 2017 09:43:48 +0000

Beautiful in English let’s the viewer dive into the most popular words translated into English through Google Translate. It focuses specifically on nouns and adjectives. From the most translated word being beautiful, to the most translated word per language, the top 10 per language and finally the similarities between all languages. See which languages seem related through the words they both translate. But also how culture defines unique words, such a gentleman for the French.

Marble Butterflies

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 22:13:23 +0000

Driven by butterfly data, let these generative butterflies free across your screen to evolve & develop and be mesmerized as your screen fills up with colorful paths. This was a personal exploration of combining data with generative art to create something that is based on data, but wants to engage its audience first and foremost, instead of teaching its audience about (the numbers within) the data.

The data sketches topic for February was nature and to me, nature is guided by randomness; mutations that happen without reason are the existence of evolution. And what is generative art if not driven (in part) by randomness.

All the Fights in Dragon Ball Z

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 22:20:44 +0000

Dive into all 200 fights that happened during Dragon Ball Z. Starting with the first fight between Picollo and Raditz, each fight is represented by a cluster of circles. Swooshing lines representing a particular character makes it easier to understand their fighting patterns. By hovering over a fight you get more insight into the what happened and who was fighting whom. Seeing the overview of all the fights in this manner reveals interesting insights that might’ve been hidden otherwise. Such as Goku, the main protagonist. He appears in most fights overall, however he’s still missing in action for very large periods of time, due to being dead (twice) or sick/recovering from injuries.

The Top 2000 ❤ the 70s & 80s

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 13:15:12 +0000

This infographic looks at the Top 2000 songs ever made and how they are spread according to their year of release. From the 60’s in the bottom left corner to 2016 in the top right, each song is represented by a circle. The circles are sized according to their position in the Top 2000 and the darker a circle, the higher the position it reached in the weekly top 40s. Several groups of special songs are highlighted. Such as all 38 tracks from the Beatles in blue, David Bowie in yellow and Prince in purple, while the top 10 is made even more apparent by making them appear as tiny vinyl records. The infographic shows that the 70s & 80s are still the most appreciated era’s in terms of music.

Magic is Everywhere

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 08:00:40 +0000

In Magic is Everywhere I’ve investigated the titles of ±900 fantasy books to look for trends in their titles. Magic is the most common word in all titles. Followed by fire, dark & red. In general, terms relating to unpleasant things are more common than those relating to positive aspects. Nevertheless, titles relating directly to magic can be found throughout the visual, indicating that the one thing that binds fantasy books together is, not surprisingly, Magic.

Royal Constellations

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 22:19:30 +0000

Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. This leads to very interesting & entangled family trees which the Royal Constellations visual tries to convey. Dive into the web of family relations to see how all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors. By hovering and clicking on one of the 3000 stars, each of which represent a person, the web reveals aspects such as 6-degrees of separation and shortest paths between two people.

Olympic feathers

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 15:30:32 +0000

More than 5000 Olympic events have had a winner in the Summer Olympics since the first games of 1896. In Olympic Feathers you can investigate how each of these medals has been won in the 56 different sporting disciplines that have competed at the games, of which 41 are still held at Rio 2016. To see patterns appear in certain sports, such as weightlifting going from mostly European medals to Asian countries during the recent Olympic Games, or get a sense of the number of events that each sport has and when women events were finally added to each sport. This visualization shows the entire history and lets the viewer decide what they want to focus on.

The Words in the Lord of the Rings

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 13:07:30 +0000

In more than 11 hours of the Lord of the Rings trilogy all characters combined speak approximately 32,000 words. The 9 members of the Fellowship alone take up about 17,000 of these words, a bit more than half. In this visualization you can find out how many words a member has spoken at each different location throughout the trilogy. Did you realize how much Sam truly spoke. Or that Legolas said even less than Boromir!