Poster Design Concept

Wow, it’s been some time since I last posted. We have 2 more weeks of Peter Pan recordings to do, and the podcasts to get up. Things are mostly on schedule.

I have been falling in love with the work of Edward Tufte, a design professor at Yale. My parents heard him speak–his books are some of the loveliest modern publications I have touched. Elegant is too awkward a word to describe.

Here is a (badly photo-copied) example of his work, a history of 20th century American music. He also compiles excellent examples of design.

Here is my idea. I will take the video popularity data from YouTube (see a snapshot of p4’s data from the last Quarterly Reports) and each video’s popularity displayed in such a way that, together, they make obvious the effects individual videos (and changes to those videos) have on the overall popularity of the channel.

If I had 3 videos, and I uploaded video 1 on April 2, video 2 on April 5, and video 3 on April 8.

On April 6 I added subtitles to video 1.

Now, we can look at the individual graphs, and they will tell a story. And we can look at the channel, and it will tell a story. While the bump on April 6-10 can be seen on both graphs, the fact that it comes from adding subtitles to video 1 is not clear on the channel popularity channel.

So, what I want to do is have the graphs of video 1, 2, and 3 on the same graph so their interactions are explicit. So imagine the branching of the 20th century  American music, but the branches are the added hits from new videos. Originally all branches are part of video 1’s line.

On April 5 video 2 is introduced and video 1’s line continues, and the hits which video 2 represented are shown by its distance above video 1’s line. Now video 2’s line represents the overall hits for the channel.

On April 6 video 2’s hits are the same as the day before, but the line jumps because the video 1 line below it jumped in response to the additional hits from the subtitles. It will remain elevated until April 10 (unless there is a significant enough drop in the popularity of video 2 to counteract the bump of video 1).

On April 8 video 3 is added, branches off from the video 2 line, and now represents the total video hits for the channel.

An so on.

I think it should be cool!

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