Writing

Piet Mondrian Goes to the Super Bowl

Beneath a pile of 1099s, I found myself distracted still thinking about the logo colors and proportions seen in the previous post. This led to a diversion to extract the colors from the Super Bowl logos and depict them according to their usage. The colors are counted up and laid out using a Treemap.

The result for all 43 Super Bowl logos, using the same layout as the previous image:

my last hour or two

A few of the typical pairs, starting with 2001:

35_500px.jpg

36_500px.jpg

37_500px.jpg

See all of the pairings here. Some notes about what’s mildly clever, and the less so:

  • The empty space (white areas or transparent background) is subtracted from the logo, and the code tries to size the Treemap according to the aspect ratio of the original image, so that when seen adjacent the logo, things look balanced (kinda).
  • The code is a simple adaptation of the Treemap project in Chapter 7 of Visualizing Data.
  • Unfortunately, I could not find vector images (for all of the games, at least), which means the colors in the original images are not pure. For instance, edges of a solid blue color will have light blue edges because of smoothing (anti-aliasing). This makes it difficult to accurately figure out what’s a real color and what isn’t. Sometimes the fuzzy edge colors are correctly removed, other times not so much. Even worse, it may even remove legitimate colors that are used in less than 4-5% of the image.
  • The color quantization isn’t good. On a few, it’s bad, and causes a few similar colors to disappear.
  • All the above could be fixed, but taxes are more important than non-representational art. (That’s not a blanket statement — just for me this evening.)

And finally, I don’t honestly think there’s any relationship between a software algorithm for data visualization and the work of an artist like Piet Mondrian. But I do love the idea of a Dutch painter from the De Stijl movement making his way through the turnstiles at Raymond Jones Stadium.

Monday, February 2, 2009 | collections, examples, football, represent, sports, time  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.