An updated annual report and reflection has been posted.
In an act of sleep-defiance unwise before an exam week I stayed up to make my annual report for Dan’s contest. Here it is for all of you to critique, laugh about, or simply ignore:
In the coming days, I will be making the interface for viewing it prettier (not that Flickr isn’t). I will also be posting about the process from both a technical and philosophical perspective. For now, enjoy!
Very cool Arthus! I’m looking forward to finding out how you made it. I was willing to possibly do a visual year review, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it.
Nicely done. When I heard of the visual report contest I was quite intrigued and thought about giving it a shot. Unfortunately, I seem to need more sleep than you. I think my favorite is your “I Wrote” calendar. Very clean & easy to understand- the icons for holidays and such was a great touch as well.
I’m particularly interested in how you parsed out the information for the “I Worked” chart.
@Paul: Thanks. I’ll be going into the process all week long. Hint: It’s all about having lots of data to start with.
@Ben: Thanks. I too found the calendar to be my favorite, though I still don’t think I got the colors perfectly.
I’ll be going into more detail about the “I Worked” chart on Thursday, but as a hint it is parsed out of my todo list.
I like your “I wrote” the best–the minicalendars are a nice touch. I find the “I read” slightly confusing–is the # in the bars items or feeds?
@Penelope: I was wondering if that would be understood. The numbers are the number of feeds. I did put subscriptions as a y axis label, but probably was too minimalist by not labeling the x axis as well. Definitely not number of items. (After all, I read 8978 items total)
Arthus, I am intrigued by your blog. Very diverse! I have linked ( http://8thfl.blogspot.com/2008/01/look-of-student-blogging.html#links )to it in a post on our Eighth Floor educators’ professional development blog. We are a technology and learning center for educators. If you don’t mind, I would like to use your blog as one example of what student blogging can look like. I think the diversity of your blog will inspire teachers to give blogging a chance.
Nice!
Thanks for the link, Lee. I’m glad you see diversity in my writing. Feel free to use my blog as an example. All of my writing is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, meaning you are free to use it for your purposes.
Dear Arthus,
I just wanted to say that I liked your slides a lot — they aren’t too busy, and they convey exactly what you want them to without anything superfluous. The other trap in that direction is boring, I would think, but they are anything but that. Maybe the best word would be “crisp.” I think my favorite bit of them is actually the color selection (especially on the first two slides). And I think my favorite slide is the first — it is the most visually captivating to me. (I keep looking back at it.)
Awesome.
Sam Shah
Thanks, Sam. I was definitely going for the “crisp” feel of an annual report. Actually, the color scheme for the first 2 slides is based upon the default used in iWork Numbers. You can find the two color schemes I used on COLOURlovers: