Variations on a Theme

I've got an obsession with my collection of listening data, and I love finding new ways and styles of visualising these data. This ongoing series, titled New Music Every* Day (NME*D) 1 , is a way for me to develop my design sensibilities, layout skills, and technical abilities, all while creating artistic data viz.

Click the images to view full-size versions, along with some of my thoughts and inspirations for each.

The Graphics

Flowers

Dots

Though not technically a NME*D variant, this static layout of my interactive First Listens visualisation is very much the progenitor of this series. Because the only option for layout I was aware of at the time was Inkscape, which I knew to be quite buggy, the entire layout of this graphic was done using the R statistics coding language—it involved an awful lot of re-running the code over and over to make tiny adjustments to positioning and spacing.

Read more about the making of the interactive viz in this blog post.

The true beginning of NME*D, I designed this graphic to go on the back of a jumper. This was my first foray into a more explicitly artistic and poster-style of graphic, and I was inspired partly by The Designer's Republic™ and late 90's PS1 games.

Read more about this graphic in the accompanying blog post.

Perspectives

Squares

This began its life, in a much earlier iteration, as an experiment with incorporating a 3D perspective into a 2D image. The effect worked well enough for that initial image, but the implementation was flawed. Revisiting the idea and diving deeper into researching perspective and matrix transformations, I was able to much better implement 3D perspective (which I did in the R statistics coding language) and create the main visualisation of the graphic.

To accompany the early computer graphics style of the perspective grid, the layout—and cheesy ad copy—was inspired by 90's Apple magazine adverts.

Blog post coming soon.

The combination of inspirations for this graphic blended the new with the old:

  • For the new, I came across this post on Instagram of an abstract grid, and I was fascinated by the details and aspect ratio of the grid, and I wanted to apply my own data to the idea.
  • And for the old, I was at the time watching a lot of House (the medical TV show starring Hugh Laurie), whose title sequence takes stills from Gray's Anatomy (the textbook, not the TV show). This inspired the ornate, detailed, italicised text and the general sepia-toned hues of the graphic.

Blog post coming soon.

  1. The name "New Music Every* Day" is a nod to my desire to listen to new music while caveating that I clearly haven't listened to it every day for the last 9 years.↩︎