Δ Dollar Over Time
Background
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Most of the basic goods foundational to living are significantly more expensive for current generations of Americans than recent previous ones. This visualization aims to illustrate that.
Project Objective:
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My goal is to show users with varying degrees of economic and numerical literacy the changing cost of goods through playful animation.
Discovery Phase
Playing with ideas
GoodNotes is great for writing and synthesizing
I'll be using this CPI list from the Federal Reserve
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure that examines the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services, such as transportation, food, and medical care. It is one of the most widely used indicators for inflation. A rise in the CPI indicates an increase in the cost of living, while a decrease signifies deflation.
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I think the broad CPI is useful, but I want the user's experience of changing wages and prices to have a tangible feeling. I'm going to break down the CPI through different categories: clothing, computing, food and beverage, housing, TV's, cars, tuition/school/childcare, toys, public transportation, household energy, college, and medical care. I've decided I'll start playing with some design ideas before I build some visuals in Python, so that I have an idea of what sorts of visualizations I want to create.
The cost of clothing increase from 1984-2021, rendered in Python.
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User Personas
Design Ideation
Experimental visualizations
I settled on a simple graph with a bar along the x axis, two points that can be toggled, and icons that can be selected/deselected.
After getting a basic design hashed out, I started building.
Next, I went heavily into the design phase in Illustrator. The next step was to jump into some coding and make these visuals interactive!
Later on, I decided to change the visual style to hand-drawn (colored pencil + paper)
