Soylent Green meets IronViz: What’s on Your Plate?

I’m quite odd when it comes to food. It scares me in a way. So when the IronViz feeder was about food, I panicked. I looked at a bunch of stuff until I saw this:

Keep in mind: I’m completely the demographic for this. I’m vegetarian. But after soy, rice, cashew, oat, and 900 other variations of non-milk milk (most of which contain carrageenan), I ended up on Soylent Green. It goes well with my food paranoia.

Dunno about you, but this movie was scarier than most horror flicks.

I did a lot of research for this viz. I’d share all my readings if I could, but my hard drive melted. Like ‘more than any Wendy’s cheeseburger could aspire to’ melted. Maybe it was the 86 browser windows, or the 3 instances of Tableau, or who knows what…but after 4 years of hard work, it finally gave up the ghost. On late Friday. Of this week. I spent the better part of Saturday trying to resurrect it until I bit the the bullet and bid it adieu like sour milk.

I took this as training for IronViz. Build it once. Build it again including ALL data formatting. In 24 hours. With no color palettes. Or any of my other tools. It’s a true test of what can be done in a short time with minimal resources. At some point, when I get all my palettes back, fonts, logos, icons and what have you, I may revisit it. That’s yet another beauty of Tableau dashboards, the ease of updating.

I went infographic because I wanted to guide through this. I’ll probably reconsider some of the transitions at some point, but again, I wanted to get this out. There’s a TON more data in the timeline, so, that’s another area to potentially revisit. And, I FINALLY got an excuse to build a green dashboard (don’t knock – you got your colors, too).

So, here is my quick burn on calories for the IronViz.