KCBW Day 3: Infographic

Today's assignment for the 4th Knit & Crochet Blog Week is to create an infographic. I love infographics. I link to the Daily Infographic website from pages I'm responsible for at work. And I'm totally enamored of all those Edward Tufte books. Although, after you see this post, you'll be justified in wondering whether I read them very closely. With that in mind, behold, the Manatee of Steven's Ravelry Projects!


I had a lot of fun and learned a lot pulling this together -- even if it doesn't look as impressive as it did in my mind. This represents the number of projects I've started per year according to my entries in Ravelry. I couldn't squeeze in the numbers, but there should be 3 projects each on the nose (2005) and the tip of the tail (2013).  As you can see, I average in the low teens -- slow, steady and manatee-esque.

It turns out I've done right around 100 projects since I've started tracking them in Ravelry, so it was pretty easy to divide the manatee into hundredths. Tufte would point out that this graphic is a bit misleading, because it implies that the area of each shaded section has informational meaning, but really, you should just look at the horizontal distances between sections. Guilty as charged. It would have made more sense as a bar graph. But manatee graphs are way more interesting than bar graphs.

Here are a few details about how all this came about. I used a Google image search for manatee outline to find this graphic from the Save the Manatee Club. I also used some instructions I found online for pulling Ravelry projects data into an Excel spreadsheet. I was going to build a chart via Excel, but that didn't really go anywhere. I pulled the outline into Gimp and spent way to much time figuring out how to draw lines and shade things. Mostly, I used Gimp because I wanted to make the background transparent in GIF format. As you can see, I'm no graphics expert, but I did enjoy doing this!