Time | infovis-2015

General Description: With this display I'm trying to communicate to my audience that this section of the infographic is about a comparison between the salaries of Chen and Darvish Yu (both entered the Major League from Nippon Professional League in 2012). I start with both of their salaries by year in chronological order (a time series without the actual timeline) and represent the magnitude of their salaries with the height of the labels.

Emulation Description: This display emulates my visual language model by emulating the timeline element to the bottom of the model. It uses realistic photo cut-outs for Chen and Yu, a technique employed by my visual language model. This display also emulates the color model in the use of same color for texts and text-background combination. It emulates my typography model by usingArial Narrow Bold for the title (and all caps) and Arial Narrow for the labels/annotations.

Displays that exploit the visual potential of time

Critique #1: Kerstin Huang

For the 1st display, she liked the fill representation of salaries because it gave a better visual for the changes in amount. While for the 2nd display, she thought the use of lines appeared to be more clear because of the dot labeling on the lines. As for annotations, she like the style in the 2nd display in which the horizontal orange line is aligned with the grid line. She suggested experimenting by combining the two such that the display followed a clear line which using the fill to visually represent the amount.

Model Emulation Feedback

When I showed her my models she thought my displays emulated elements from my models well. She liked how the 1st display emulated the semi-transparent fills in the visual language model. She also thought that both displays emulated the style of the title pretty well.

Revisions based on this critique

I combined the design concepts in the 1st and 2nd display by adding the solid lines from the 2nd display to the 1st. I also added the dot labeling for each data point to make them recognizable on the lines.

First Iteration

Final display:

Second Iteration

Sources: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/chenwe02.shtml , http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/darviyu01.shtml

Critique #2: Youta

For the 1st display, he thought the amount was hard to show because it appeared as if the Chen's salaries were on gradual increase over time (esp. 2015-2016) rather than receiving a bump. He preferred the 2nd display because it appeared to be more clear with the dots and easier to read. For both displays, he thought the annotation seemed to be too wordy and suggested shortening it down a bit.

Model Emulation Feedback

When I showed him my models, he thought my displays looked fine. He said they emulated my models pretty well (the use of semi-transparent fills, title styles, line styles, color-text combinations).

Revisions based on this critique

For this critique I mostly edited on the annotation so that they are shorter. I chose to place the actual amount of salary for 2015 and 2016 because I think that will help my audience read the big bump in Chen's salary better.

Critique #3: Chris

For the 1st display, he thought it was along the gray area of a number display and time display because the emphasis on time wasn't as strong. He suggested adding dots to the 1st display to make each data points on the time more obvious to the audience. For the 2nd display, he thought it was almost the same (could've placed more emphasis on time better) except it was representing the data with solid lines. On overall he preferred the visual of the 1st display, but he suggested carrying the idea of placing dots for each data set from the 2nd display to the 1st display.

Model Emulation Feedback

When I showed him my models, he said it was doing fine in emulating the visual elements and color-text combinations from my model.

Revisions based on this critique

This critique also gave me the inspiration to add the dot annotations so that the data points appeared to be more obvious, so I added the dot labeling to the 1st display as well.

Critique #3: Stacy Zheng

When I showed her my revised display, she thought it was more like a number display than a time display. Although she liked the idea of using area time series, she thought using a timeline would be better if I wanted to emphasize certain events that effected the pitchers' salaries or simply reduce the amount of number visuals from the display.

Model Emulation Feedback

When I showed her my models, she thought the display emulated the text-color combination but it didn't really emulate the visual elements well. She could tell that I was emulating the use of semi-transparent visuals and the title, but the current display was still too much like a number display. She recommended going more with the timeline display design idea than the area time series design.

Revisions based on this critique

Based on this critique, I completely redid the entire display by designing from a central timeline with portraits of Chen and Yu and their respective salaries for each year. I tried to emulate my visual language model by presenting high-detaied photo cut-outs as the main visual elements. The photo cut-outs of Chen were in colored, whereas those of Yu were converted to grayscale. I also used the thick gray line as the body of the timeline. To emulate my color model, I used the same color for text and text background, and for typography model I used Arial Narrow throughout.

Critique #2: Yi Pang

When she saw the revision, she thought there were slightly more emphasis on the lines rather than the data points. She suggested removing them or making them thinner so that the audience's focus would be more on the data points. She thought the 2 enlarged orange dots were good because they showed that they were important events on the timeline. When she read the title, she was confused as to why the word "salaries" was not capitalized while other words were.

Model Emulation Feedback

When I showed her my models, she thought my previous display did a better job in emulating the use of semi-transparent visual elements because in the model, it didn't have lines outlining around the area. She suggested keeping the orange dots if I want to make the data points more clear to my audience, but she would recommend removing the lines to emulate my visual language model.

Revisions based on this critique

I did not do any revision based on this critique because I planned to redo the entire display based on Critique #3.

Critique #1: Meera

She liked the title style in which the display's topic (salary) was emphasized and 2 key information was highlighted. She felt the revision made the display a little too busy since a lot of visual elements were mixed together. She said I might want to place the annotations for 2015 above the line as it seemed to be too close to the y-axis labeling.

Model Emulation Feedback

When I showed her my models, she thought I emulated the color model well in the use of semi-transparent areas overlapping one another. The annotation also appeared to follow a similar style to the center visual element (of Ronaldo).

Revisions based on this critique

I did not do any revision based on this critique because I did not receive any negative feedback. In addition, I planned to redo the entire display based on Critique #3.