Making sense of data for infographics

Basic techniques

We were tasked with extracting some figures from data.gov.uk and making sense of it visually.

I copied figures from the Dept for Education spend over the last 4 years, added them up in Excel, divided by 1,000,000 and then showed them based on how much it would cost one UK resident (divide by 65 million), over the last 4 years. The idea was to relate the data to something more meaningful. Initially I thought I might illustrate the costs in terms of where you could go on holiday with the same amount of money, but the costs of holidays seemed too variable. I decided to scale the £ sign in line with the amount as this makes an instant impact, allowing you to compare years easily. I have referenced the data source, and included graphics to enable the reader to view more detailed information.

The years on my graphs are shown in reverse order, so this should have been changed.

Following group feedback in class, I made the following changes to my infographic: