As soon as I saw the infographic,
I immediately knew what it was about. If it wasn't the red curtain-like backdrop
or film-strip graphics, then it was the text. The infographic title and date of
award ceremony were very effective in their role of making the focus of the
graphic explicit. Labels for each film strip also made it easy to realize the
context for each set of sub-visualizations.
The organization of
the various visualizations was quite intuitive. Upon seeing the graphic divided
in an even juxtaposition, I knew the nature of this work was comparative. By simply referring to the
headings, I had no trouble navigating the graphic and understanding exactly
what was being compared.
I admire the clever
use of colours. In deciding to investigate the representational value of the
palette, I was pleased to discover a great amount of attention to detail. In
the Genre category, for instance,
colours appear to have been based on the actual film genre (i.e. red for
romance). The colours of films on the opposite side of the graphic matched this
scheme. Furthermore, if we look at the Runtime
and Rating Rank categories, we'll
notice that the colour of horizontal bars grows in brightness as the length of the
bar increases. This golden hue also happens to resemble that of the golden
Oscar statuettes.
To make a suggestion,
I would encourage an alternate use of data visualization for the IMDB Rating
Rank of 2013 films – something more visually discernable than a text-based list
ordered by ranking. Perhaps a series of gold stars filled to depict the film's
rating (not unlike the system used by IMDB).
In any case, this is a
lovely infographic which poses a popular question. However, rather than simply
answering it, it provides the viewer with enough visually represented data to
make it a pleasure to pursue. Bravo.
