For my data sketch I found a ranking of the different US States and their policies regarding LGBTQ+ rights. Many states have adopted bills in favor of protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ people, while others have been actively passing harmful ones or refusing to acknowledge that there are problems at all.
I focused in on six key aspects of human rights to correspond with the six colors of the pride flag: Employment as red, Housing as orange, Public Accommodations as yellow, Education as Green, Hate Crime Acknowledgement as blue, and Name/Gender Marker Updates as purple. Using my sources, I gave the states a score for each category scaled from 0-3, with 0 being laws seen as actively harmful or a near complete lack of support, 1 being a small mix of support but a lack in majority, 2 being supportive but still either missing rights or having remaining “bad” policies, and 3 marking an overall good acceptance in that area. The numbers correspond to the saturation of the representative color box. There are also a few states that managed to get a -1 in certain categories because not only for they ignore violations of human rights, they actively have laws in place to prevent them. In these cases there is no color at all.
A few things have changed between iterations; there is only one state shown at a time and by default it will cycle through all of the states in alphabetical order, changing every two seconds. The program is interactive to a certain extent; when clicked it pauses the queue (demonstrated with Massachusetts in the video). In the future I hope to make it so the user can use a mouse wheel or trackpad to scroll through the states to find a specific one.
Sources:
https://www.hrc.org/resources/state-scorecards
Question(s): I’m also still trying to find a good middle-ground between text and imagery when it comes to explaining the piece because without the context of what each color is referring to I’m worried the piece makes less sense. On the technical side, I’m still trying to figure out how to incorporate more states at once to have an even clearer comparison and seeing if there’s a way to use a mouse wheel/trackpad inside the jitter window. If anyone can help with that let me know!
I found your piece compelling for all 1:45 the way you made your visuals speak so much for the data you gathered. Although the South is known for suppressing LGBTQ+ rights, oftentimes to an extreme, it was different seeing how much, instead of hearing. The color coding and presentation were very easy to follow and understand!
I found it striking the amount of states that didn’t have color blocks for some of the categories. One suggestion to your question is that you could have a map of the states and use the hover feature to allow the person to choose which state they want to see. This would allow you not to have to use text and you can map all the different colors to the corresponding state. Looking from the website with the other categories that they had for each state, what made you choose the ones for your visual?
I chose the six I did because they are broader categories that generally covered different aspects of LGBTQ+ rights. I originally wanted to include the statistics that involved trans rights specifically as the transgender flag on its own, but due to time and because I wasn’t able to smoothly separate them into their own categories.
One simple idea to incorporate more states at once would simply be to stack them vertically. I do think that seeing more at once would make the piece more interesting, and reduce the number of phases it has to go through for one to see everything. You could group them alphabetically, geographically, or (I think preferably) by overall level of support.
Animating across each of the states really personalizes the issue for the viewer as they can view LGBTQ+ acceptance based on where they live and where they call home. Incredibly compelling and very well done.
I have a permissioned opinion — First of all, I love this piece, and I think the imagery works very well. I think it would be neat if there was an explanation (over or under the squares) of what a square represents if you hover over it (kind of like a tooltip). I think that would give the art context while also maintaining simplicity.
I noticed that you included all the states, which must have taken so much time and effort to research and program. I think you have a really good balance of text and color/shapes currently and the design is very effective in communicating what you want it to.
For your question, perhaps you could make it so when you mouse hover over a color it shows a quick description as to what it’s describing or measuring?
The color contrast between the colored squares and the black background as well as the contrast between the muted colors and their meanings is striking.
What made you decide which pride colors would go to which category?
In all honesty it was done because of the order the original data was in. I am considering changing it around, but am not sure how I would do so in the sense that I am unsure how I would put more meaning behind the colors.
Firstly I would say this piece definitely feel more than informative to me. I like the color contrast between the pride colors and the black background very much. As anresponse to the artist question, I would say the meaning came across pretty well. But it could also be good if you can make a text explaining the meaning of each color appear when you put your mouse on them. In such way the piece may be able to maintain the minimalist composition while being more self-explainatory.