Asteroids

A 45-metre-wide asteroid came remarkably close to Earth on Friday, even closer than communication and weather satellites. It was be the nearest known close miss for an object of its size.   

When this story was first mentioned in the newsroom, a few days before the incident, it sparked debate. People were intrigued as to how close these objects come to Earth. How many pass by? And how fast or large are they? A perfect opportunity for an interesting graphic.    

As usual, NASA had every piece of information we needed. Their Near-Earth Object Program was established in 1998 to help coordinate, and provide a focal point for the study of comets and asteroids that can approach the Earth's orbit. They have data sets on all close approaches to Earth since 1900 and projected forward to 2200.    

The main part of the graphic shows all close approaches passing the Earth at a distance of one Lunar Distance (LD) or less. In other words, passing closer to Earth than the Moon. All 199 historical and projected passes are shown. All are arranged on the vertical axis by the distance they came to Earth. The axis represents the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Both of which are represented at each end, drawn to scale. The Length of each bar represents the speed at which the asteroid was traveling. White objects have already passed and orange are forecast.     

We also included two smaller diagrams. One showing 2012 DA14's orbit and how it will pass Earth and another showing its size compared to the Space Shuttle and the largest asteroid on the chart.    

The chart below did not make it on to the graphic.    

This shows all the asteroids over time. Every close approach recorded by NASA from the year 1900 to 2200 going out even further to 5 Lunar Distances or less. When we plotted it on this chart we noticed a strong trend. The last decade or so has seen a huge spike in the number of close approaches. Or has it? We figured this chart was too good to be true and assumed it may have something to do with recent technology and a greater ability to track these objects now. After speaking to NASA our suspicions were confirmed. It is harder to back track and accurately plot every close approach earlier in the 20th century and hard to predict as many in the distant future. After learning this we decided the chart was slightly misleading and decided to drop it.    

We decided the information we were showing was strong and simple enough to hold a full page and ran the graphic in Friday's newspaper as a back page.

Arteries of the city

I created this graphic back in October shortly after Hong Kong's Transport Department released their annual traffic census. The 182-page report was packed with statistics and useful information but the best data was a thorough breakdown of daily traffic on almost every stretch of road. The territory has hundreds of counting stations. We thought the chance to do something with these numbers was too good to miss so we pitched an analysis to the Editor who was keen to give it a good space.

The thickness of each line represents the average daily number of vehicles traveling on that stretch of road. The colour represents the percentage change on last year. This helps the reader to explore the data in two ways. You can clearly see that the main roads along the front of Hong Kong Island are still the busiest. But by the colour, the traffic has also mostly decreased compared to last year. You can also see that a lot of the roads in Kowloon have become busier. In particular the area up to the left, Tsuen Wan, the three tunnels north and the major highways to the east.

There is also a clear change in the cross-harbour tunnels. The Eastern and Western Harbour Tunnels have increased in traffic compared to the central tunnel which has decreased. But they still see less traffic.

The graphic is also a fun way for the reader to take a look around their neighbourhood or route to work.

Roadside pollution in Hong Kong hit a record high this year, on August 2 in Central, with the index reaching 212. As the year drew to a close, we took a look at how the air had fared in every hour in the year up to the publishing date.

Each day is represented by a row of 24 squares, one for each hour of the day. The shade of the square indicates the pollution reading at Central monitoring station.

The idea was to give the reader an overall glance at the year so they can see the worst and clearer periods, but also the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the hourly data. We also added some text pointers to explain some probable contributing factors to clearer air such as typhoons.

Hong Kong’s air pollution is often blamed on its proximity to mainland China’s industry. Wind direction each day is included as small arrows to the left of each row in order to gauge, if any, the relationship between northerly winds and bad air.

We wanted the reader to come to their own conclusion about the relationship with wind direction but it turns out a lot of the bad spells coincide with winds from the North (black arrows). See below.

The graphic was published as a full broadsheet back page near the end of December.

Messi v Muller

We published this information graphic when Lionel Messi broke Gerhard Muller's record of 85 goals in a calendar year. 

The chart shows every goal, plotted by date scored. The length of a bar represents the number of goals scored in that day’s match. 

We wanted to do more than simply compare the number of goals each player has scored. Presenting every goal on a timeline in this way allows us to study the data and draw our own conclusions as to which of the two goalscorer's records in most impressive. It lets us see busy scoring periods, drier seasons, big hauls in some games (often scoring 4 or 5 goals) and most importantly, how Muller continued his prolific scoring rate for many years after he set the record in 1972.

The data for Messi's goals and when he scored them was pretty easy to find from various reliable websites. Muller's was not so easy. So much so we had to commission a private sports data company in Germany to compile it for us. In the end we decided it was worth the extra expense in order to show the information this way and give the reader a different angle to other Messi infographics they may have seen recently.

As the government considers a revamp of electricity tariffs, we took a look at Hong Kong's power consumption. Who uses all the electricity in our city and what is it used on? This graphic was printed last week as a full broadsheet back page. Data set was provided by the government's Electrical and Mechanical Services Department.

This type of chart is known as a Sankey diagram. The thickness of each line reflects a value. In this case, an amount of electricity in terajoules. All of the lines add up to give subtotals and totals by users (grey) and end use (coloured).

Wages in Hong Kong

As Hong Kong’s wealth gap widens, who is on which side of the growing divide? This graphic shows which industries pay the most and which have the biggest discrepancies between their highest and lowest earners. The dataset was provided by the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department and covers all official employment in HK. This graphic was printed as a full broadsheet page.

Each industry is represented by a series of 3 connected dots. The middle dot is the median wage for that sector and the top and bottom dots are the averages for high and low earners (90th and 10th percentile). This shows some industries have a huge difference between top earners and what most others are paid.

The height of the dots reflects the hourly wage in HK$. The industry, or green line/dots, is also placed left to right along the x axis according to how many people work in that industry. You can see Import and Export Trade alone out to the right of the chart. By far the biggest employment sector in Hong Kong.

Restaurants and estate services had the lowest two averages.

Combining hand drawn illustration with vector

This piece from a few months ago shows a slightly different approach to our graphics. We don't often get to combine soft hand drawn illustrations with vector drawings. But sometimes, instead of the two styles fighting for attention in the graphic they can compliment each other well.

This graphic was created to accompany a story covering the first implantation of a subretinal microchip in Asia. Mrs TSANG WU Suet-yun had been legally blind for 15 years. The operation at the Eye Institute of The University of Hong Kong restored her sight in one eye.

In this case we used a black and white pencil style of sketching by senior graphic artist and Illustrator Adolfo Arranz. Then the graphic was put together and vector illustrations finished by myself in Adobe Illustrator. 

Using the softer hand drawn illustrations for the face and skull allowed the major highlights like the eye and the technology to stand out more and be the main focus. The drawings served their purpose of locating the device around the skull and eye socket but also gave it a more human touch as the face drawn is an actual portrait of the lady who received the operation.

First we found good visual reference for the skull. Facing a good angle so we can show all the elements in the right eye and the eye socket and also the battery near the ear. Then drew the sections of the skull needed on one file and the portrait of Mrs Tsang at the same angle on another file. Overlaid the two and erased the parts not needed. Then we included the illustrator drawings of the eye and the device and then layered them accordingly. A few more smaller diagrams were added to explain the device and disease.

Mrs Tsang

Portrait

Skull/eye socket

Eye and device

The story was a breaking news piece so we finished and published the graphic in around 5-6 hours.

The page

Euro 2012 football graphics

Here are a couple of examples of graphics we created during the Euro 2012 football (soccer) championships. We published a preview supplement which contained some smaller graphics on individual team performance during qualifying and venue maps etc. 

I then created this graphic below as a stand alone feature in sport just before the tournament kicked off. It shows all of the goals scored during the qualifying rounds and where they were scored from. The red lines also highlight the top scorer's goals for that particular team.

For the data we worked with Opta, a UK based sports data service. They can help with almost any request for sports data and also have a subscription service if you're serious about sports graphics.

Portugal and Ronaldo detail showing all those long range goals 

This second graphic was printed before the final between Spain and Italy. A lot of press had been given to Spain's brilliant passing game. And Pirlo was also playing well and pulling the strings for Italy. After speaking to sport we decided this was a good place to start and worked on a review of all the passing, defending and attacking from the two teams so far in the finals.

For this we used a Euro2012 ipad app no longer available which was also powered by Opta. There are lots of free or reasonably priced apps available rich in sports data and often powered by great sources. This particular one even had pass tracking features so we were able to get every pass, screen shot it at high resolution and then trace them. Though it did take a long time for us to trace 6,000 passes!

On the spread

Xavi detail

Our Titanic work

Most publications would have done some sort of graphics looking back to what happened to the Titanic 100 years ago. We decided to do two separate graphics. The first looking at the ship itself, which at the time was an engineering marvel. The second, published a day later on the anniversary itself, looked at the tragic events of the sinking. For both we negotiated a large amount of space at a full broadsheet page each.

The first graphic was done by myself. Obviously I started by researching. We knew this was coming up way ahead of time so could start researching early. The main source I used for the graphic was a special edition Haynes manual I ordered over the Internet. It was 150 pages of diagrams, photos and text covering every working part of the ship. I used this as the base for my deck plans and worked from there.

Haynes manuals have been made since the 1960s for almost every popular model of car. They are aimed at owners and professional garage mechanics, helping them to strip down and rebuild cars. This was a special edition launched for the 100th anniversary of the titanic.

Inside

Deck plans

After researching I started to plan out the graphic. I traced out the flat deck plans and used the Extrude & Bevel tool in Illustrator to try them at different angles to see which gave the best view to see every room. I then illustrated the whole ship at the same angle, dissected it into the correct slices and sunk in the floor plans which I'd drawn up in 3D. All as vector in Illustrator.

Later in the graphic I realised there was some updating to be done. Although the deck plans in the manual were attributed to the shipbuilder themselves, there were a few details which didn't match some other plans I'd seen elsewhere. After getting in touch with the publisher I found out the plans in the book were for the Olympic class of cruise liner in general. There were three ships built in this class and Titanic was one of them, but she also had a lot of individual modifications being the flagship liner.

The Discovery Channel also had some very detailed blueprints of the ship which I used to cross check. One obvious difference was the promenade and millionaires' suites on B deck. See below. The Haynes version on top shows an open promenade when the Titanic actually had this section turned into private promenades as part of the two millionaires' suites.

And in the graphic...

After checking the rest of the plans a few more alterations were made. Then labels and other parts of the graphic were added. 

End result

I worked on this graphic for months in between other projects and daily work. It was published on Saturday's back page. The day before the 100th anniversary.


PART 2

The following day came the second graphic which looked at the disaster itself. This graphic, by Adolfo Arranz, had a completely different style. A more tragic feel, illustrated at night, and drawn mostly using Coral Painter in Adolfo's usual technique. Some Adobe Illustrator parts too.

The spread

This graphic ran on a spread inside the paper with a feature story on survivors.

Local issues - Public identity

In the last couple of posts I've shown graphics covering big international stories. In contrast, here is a recent graphic we created which looks at a local issue. This was part of our coverage of Hong Kong's 15th anniversary of the handover from Britain back to China. In the last 15 years  a local university has been keeping a running survey on how people would identify themselves. Either as a Honk Kong citizen or a Chinese citizen or somewhere in between. This has swung back and forth over the years for a number of possible reasons. We created this graphic to show the results over time.

We stuck with a similar solution for the interactive version. We created this one for the site so it could stay up longer and let people explore the data for themselves. This one generated the largest number of clicks to date on the paper's Facebook page. 

Interactive version can be viewed here

Malofiej 20

A look at our participation at Malofiej 20 infographic world summit and awards in Pamplona, Spain. I'm sure most of you have already read everything there is to know about the conference itself and the success of publications such as the New York Times and National Geographic this year. Here is a quick look at what we sent and what we won medals for in the Post's first ever entry to the competition.

This was a silver medal in the features category. This was a graphic by myself, again on the back page of news, to coincide with the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. The main chart shows the number of civilians who lost their lives as a result of the conflict on a monthly basis. These are compared to coalition fatalities (darker red, inset bars).

Bronze in features category. This was our first full-page graphic we negotiated for the back page. The graphic ran with a feature on the space shuttle's last mission back in July 2011.

Below are some more examples which contributed to a bronze medal in the portfolio category.

A cartogram showing the population of each country in 1950 compared to 2011. Section in the bottom left of the graphic shows how much space a crowd of seven billion would take.

Two more graphics showing the Human and financial costs of conflict since 9/11 and a chart showing 2011's most reported stories by daily word count.

Malofiej was a great experience and we look forward to seeing any of you there again next year.

http://www.malofiej20.com/  Malofiej official site
http://www.malofiej20.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/M20_Awards_Premios_OK1.pdf   Winners list