At Visual Evolution, we like nothing better than getting our teeth stuck a nice juicy infographic about sports.
Our friends over at www.collegesportsscholarships.com in California, had seen some of our previous sporting data visualisations, and thought our style was right for their study into the injustices behind the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in the USA.
For any confused Brits, reading about the BCS for the first time, it is a ridiculously structured American Football tournament, intended to create five games featuring ten of the top-ranked college football teams in the United States. Rather than relying on direct competition to decide which teams should compete in these five games, the BCS relies on a combination of polls and computer selection methods to determine relative team rankings. The entire tragically flawed system is generally regarded as confusing, corrupt, unsporting and wildly unpopular.
The upshot of this system is poor quality games, unfair distribution of money, huge taxpayer subsidies for financial losses, obscene wages at the top, an un-American system of crowning a champion and a system where smaller, unpopular sides are never given a chance to become champions.
For the sake of sports fans everywhere, let’s hope the system gets changed soon.
We were delighted once again to be asked by City & Guilds Centre for Skills and Development to help them with some infographic design work for their most recent research document. The graphics were used within a report entitled, “Urban agriculture and employability skills” and were included to visualise data and key findings from the document.
CSD has conducted a review of the evidence on how involvement in community projects which grow food in urban areas can help people to develop employability skills and ultimately find work.
> The full report can be downloaded here.
This infographic takes a look at the changing attitudes of the over 50s in their approach towards, spending, travel, and outlook on life.
Over the last few decades, age has become less of a predictive agent across many consumer fields but broad differences in the needs and attitudes of various ages will never entirely disappear.
The swell of older consumers is one of the most important emerging social phenomena shaping the UK consumer landscape today. Alongside, the concept of old age is undergoing a serious cultural reassessment as age barriers weaken and opportunities for older people blossom. Undoubtedly, this is going to revolutionise how marketers wish to segment or target older consumers; it is likely a more age inclusive approach will emerge and find commercial favour.
An infographic looking back at Arsenal striker, Robin van Persie’s 100 goals for the football club.
As featured on the official Arsenal website:
http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/robin-van-persie-100-goals-infographic
The rather wonderful “Compare the Leagues” website – http://comparetheleagues.com has produced a tool enabling users to compare various statistics for the top 20 European football leagues, as ranked by UEFA. The website is hugely efficient at sorting and displaying the data, but here we have tried to put a bit of beauty back into the numbers.
Categories for comparison, here and on the website include UEFA ranking (UEFA coefficient), European titles won (Champions League, former European Cup, Europa League, former UEFA Cup, former Cup Winners’ Cup) as well as average goals per game in every league, the probability of games ending without goals, as draws / home wins / away wins, a comparison of average football player age across the European leagues, the percentage of players currently playing in a country they weren’t born in, and also various stats about stadium attendances.
Visual Evolution, London were delighted to be involved in the creation of two infographic maps on behalf of City & Guilds Centre for Skills and Development. The maps were used within a report entitled, “Bridging the divide: Connecting training to jobs in post-conflict settings.” and were included to visualise data and key findings from the document.
The report explains why ex-combatants often struggle to secure jobs following their training and how implementing agencies and training providers can better connect training to jobs in the future. It also provides recommendations for policy makers and researchers.
> The full report can be downloaded here.
The BBC Sport website recently published its “Price of Football” survey which worked out the cost of enjoying a day at the football for fans without season tickets. The study identified those clubs offering supporters the best value for money, and showed where football could be watched most cheaply. The survey looked at: the cost of match tickets, programme prices, and the cost of tea and a pie.
In our study, we have reinterpreted the BBC data, and combined its findings with Opta’s statistical analysis, to try and offer some insight into value for money, this time, in terms of entertainment. By combining the two sets of data, we hope to demonstrate which clubs offer fans the best value. Not just the cheapest day at a Premier League football match, but also, potentially the most exciting one.
Festival season is in full swing in the UK, and here at Visual Evolution, London we have spent the last week or so assembling an infographic which hopefully gives a guide to the best of this summer’s entertainment. Set in a cartoon style, which reflects the bright and colourful nature of our client, Wink Bingo, the visualisation hopefully captures some of the magic and characters of some of the UK’s biggest summer events. The infographic gives viewers a break-down of what is happening when and where, and within a second section, the genre breakdown of each festival is broken down into a series of colourful pie charts.
Each season, Portuguese website, Futebol Finance produces a fascinating, but unfortunately, rather blandly presented list of the players it claims to be the top earners in World football (click for link). Each year we pour over the data and try to pull out some interesting facts and figures about the players within the list and the clubs they play for, and essentially try to bring to life the brilliant information they have supplied.
Inspired by their list, in February 2010 we produced our first ever infographic, based on their research, and it has proven to be one of the most popular visualisations we have ever produced, still accounting for a significant chunk of traffic visiting the Visual Evolution website. Recently, they released their figures for 2011, and they have extended the number of players from 50, up to the 100 top earners in World football.
In response to this, we are now pleased to present to you our own findings from the data.
Over the past few months, we have been working on a top secret project with some incredibly clever people at The Hay Group, a global management consulting firm. They chose to work with Visual Evolution in order to create an interactive widget to help launch their “next generation HR solution” Hay Group Spectrum.
Working alongside some fantastic creative minds and generally lovely people, we developed a flash-based questionnaire designed to help business leaders calculate how much money their organisations may be wasting due inefficiencies within their workforce. The widget involves some complicated mathematics, combined with beautiful design in order to hopefully create a quick and intuitive, packaged solution. The result is something that looks straightforward on the outside, but this simple exterior hides a very intelligent brain churning away in the background performing some quite complex calculations.
The results of the questionnaire can be sent to the respondent in the form of a nicely designed HTML email.
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