I found this infographic of the Olympic Rings used to show the distributions of certain categories, such as percent of households with TVs, child mortality, prisoners, hazardous waste, and others, between regions of the world. Each color ring represents a different region (red= Americas, blue= Oceanic region, black= Europe, yellow= Africa, green= Asia), so for each category the sizes of the rings are manipulated to show the rankings of the regions and their relativities. All of the examples can be found at this website below, as well as a video of the rings morphing and changing size.
I thought this was a really interesting and different way to show the information, and a lot more visually appealing than a chart or graph or just a list of numbers and statistics. It plays on a logo that mostly everyone is familiar with and makes it easy to compare one region to another.
In order to recreate this, I would create two layers, one with a circle of the color and one with a white circle. The white colored circle is then placed on top to make it look like just the color outline, and the layers are merged. The only issue I had with this process was that I couldn’t figure out how to resize the objects, so I had to get it right the first time or delete it and try again. Also, my circles aren’t exactly the correct proportions, but I tried. I thought this would be easier than it actually was, so I guess that shows how little I know about Photoshop. Here is my recreation of the proportion of McDonald’s Outlets around the world.
I thought that this would be an interesting was to represent data from my own issue. Perhaps I wouldn’t use the colors to show the regions of the world, but maybe I could have them represent other subsets, such as age, gender, region of the country, or other possible factors. More research would have to be done to find such statistics of populations, though.
Writing (for) the Public - Sp 2014 