Anyone reading this will know that I love to blog. I’ve owned my blog for 1210 days now and have racked up 311 posts – that is nearly equivalent to a post every 4 days! Some might say I’m obsessed or addicted but as a Graphic Design student I find it to be really beneficial and helpful in getting my work ‘out there’.
It seems so long ago now (as I am behind) but back in March I did a couple of posts on what I had been up to in the studio, which I don’t usually do but due to the style of the lessons it worked. Data Visualisation. If I’m honest, I wasn’t crazy about it at the start. I had seen some really interesting info graphics on the web, but didn’t really think it was for me. I’m not one to shy away from a challenge though and have to admit that in the end I actually quite enjoyed doing it (and have plans to continue it a bit further over the summer)! After a few weeks of practising, the end task was set – produce 2 A1 info graphic posters; 1 from data supplied by our tutor(who is very keen on Data Vis himself!) and 1 with our own data.
So I wrote a list of all the things I could use for my data; from the contents of my fridge to where I spend my time. I didn’t want to be obvious and do my blog, but I thought it would be silly to miss out on the opportunity to look into my habits and find out something interesting. WordPress does offer some statistical information but it’s quite standard and doesn’t really allow you to see any patterns:
So I wrote down a lot of numbers, dates, topics and had to decide on what to do with them all. At first, I wanted to do a 3D info graphic because I had been producing hand drawn work in a rebellion against the digital work being produced by the rest of the year(not saying there is anything wrong with it but I just like to try and do something different) but decided against it. I had produced a 3D mock up, using blog views data and was planning to go ahead with it but then I thought ‘What is this actually saying?’. I didn’t think it was showing anything interesting so looked over the data again and changed my approach.
Some days I have posted 5 times, with a 3 minute gap between them but in contrast I have been able to go 29 days without posting anything. I wanted to know ‘What is my favourite day/ month/ time of day to post?’, so that’s what I looked at!
I then was faced with the decision of how to make it ‘look pretty’. My first thoughts were to make it look like my blog, but the golden rule is not to go with your first idea(usually). I decided to use data from 3 years of blogging (which means none of 2012 is included) to make it a bit easier and thought ‘Ah, triangles have 3 sides. Maybe I could use triangles somehow?’ I love triangles anyway, so began to test some things out:
At this point I was almost ready to give up on it looking half decent at all…
Here comes the turning point though. I had the idea of using triangles(as months) made up from smaller triangles(as days)…
… and then it began to come together finally.
After tweaking with it for what seemed like forever, I ‘settled’ on a final outcome:
Wanna see a few details? Oh, go on then…
April 2010 was my ‘bloggiest’ month – 16 posts, with a 4 posts on 1 day and 3 posts on 3 days!
My favourite time to post? 2009 & 2010 was 6PM but in 2011 that changed to 10AM.
I also included some facts to spell out some of the weirder things I found out about my habits – e.g. I have typed 88,956 words on my blog! Eeek! That is a lot of waffle 
If you like what you see and are feeling generous, then it would make me happy if you could go over to my behance and appreciate the project by clicking on the thumbs up at the bottom!
I actually got quite into this project in the end and am happy with the final outcome. I am even thinking about doing some others to follow it up over the summer so if you liked this, then keep an eye out!
