Alternative Data Visualization

DESIGN BEHIND-THE-SCENES 1

For the second graph, which addresses how the interest in office clothing changed during the pandemic, it was challenging to find a way to represent the big and broken numbers. One of the solutions was to use a piece of clothing to represent, for example, ten interests and rescale it to the corresponding fraction missing. However, this would get complicated with small fractions, such as 1/20 for "suit jacket" in April 2020. 

I proposed using another piece of clothing to represent these smaller numbers - the tie. With this element, it was easy to create a cohesive symbol in all cases, which was also smaller than the main pieces of clothing - which facilitated the interpretation. The image below shows how symbols were set for this graph.

DESIGN BEHIND-THE-SCENES 2

For the graph that represents the peak of pants-style interests, it was hard to draw the pants and keep them all visible from the bottom (interest 0) to the top (peak interest) as they had really distinct interest numbers. The solution I found was to have all of them start at the same line—a random negative y-line—and end at their peak. This made it easy to compare and understand the data and still visualize the pant styles. I added the graph guidelines in the back and the change in interest to the time in the back to help with the interpretation.

DESIGN BEHIND-THE-SCENES 2

The graph comparing the interest in 3 trending shoe models had the same problem of high and broken numbers problem as the office clothing one. For this graph, however, it was easy to show boxes representing big numbers - 10 - and resize them for the broken parts. I also added the number representation to the boxes as if they were the shoe sizes to make it possible to get the exact number. For the resizing, I used Adobe Illustrator's rescale function and the square root of the proportion I wanted to make the area accurate.