Oil Spill Continued

There's a lot of material on the oil spill right now, so I decided I want to talk about a couple more graphics about the spill. This graphic designed by Carol Zuber-Mallison has more information than any source I have looked at.

This app for Google World  is absolutely mind blowing and presents an incredibly simple yet powerful message about the oil spill.

The first graphic is also amazing in its own way. It is also a little bit overwhelming. The graphic has a timeline, pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and other data representation methods that I don't know the names of. The amount of information presented on this graphic would take pages and pages of text to describe in any sort of comprehensible manner.  The problem is that the information should take several pages of graphics too. The designer tried so hard to pack as much information as she could into the graphic that she made it nearly impossible to follow. So many of the graphs are intertwined with other graphs that it is hard to understand what is happening.

The graphic would be easier to understand if it was printed out on a large sheet of paper because it would be easier to rapidly look at different graphs and charts quickly, which would make it easier to associate different data. To me, it doesn't seem like this was designed well for the web. With my laptop screen I can only see a small portion of image at any given moment. Perhaps with a larger screen, or multiple monitors I would be able to comprehend the graphic on the computer as well as I can read it on paper.

So far I've just been trashing the graphic, but it's not as bad as it sounds. The main issue is that it is not well designed for the medium which which it is most commonly viewed. I don't think that it is possible to make a graphic this large and have it still be appropriate for viewing on a computer screen. The designer could have created several different graphics that were sized appropriately. She could have had an separate graphic for the timeline, the map, the environmental hazards, the economic costs, the opinion polls and any other category listed on the chart.

The Google Earth app is incredible. I haven't seen anything else that can put the size of the oil spill into perspective the way the app can. Last post I looked at some animations that showed how the oil spill moved across the ocean. Even though those pictures showed where the spill was and how large it was, it was difficult to put the size of the spill into perspective. When I saw that the spill reached from an hour and a half drive south to an hour and a half drive north I realized how large of an area the spill covered. When I realized that the oil was several inches deep in places, the size of the became even more clear and even more frightening.

These two sources both share the goal of demonstrating how large and destructive the spill can be, but they go about it in different ways. The first graphic, in its current state, is too overwhelming to be useful, but it has the potential to be useful if it is optimized for viewing on the computer. The Google Earth app is an amazing, creative use of new technology that gives us a perspective of the oil spill that would have been nearly impossible as recently as a year ago.