Colored Tree, Cookies, and Stairs in Visualization Ad

These ads for Hospital Alemán from Saatchi & Saatchi color code physical items for what parents say and what children do.

TREE_HOSPITAL_COOKIES

TREE_HOSPITAL_TREE

It’s not quantitative at all, and a lot of you probably won’t even consider this visualization. It is pretty though, and I could see how this idea might be applied to data.

[via I Believe in Advertising | Thanks, Ken]

11 Comments

  • I love them. Intelligent and beautiful. I just have got one criticism: they should have changed the order of the legend. In the graphics, the “children do” area is always on top/over the “parents say” area, but the order in the legend is the other way around, “parents say” over “children do”. This makes interpretation harder.

    • As data visualisation the order of the legend would make sense the other way round, but as adverts I think they work much better this way. What children do comes after what the parents tell them to do, which is funnier; and it also forces us to spend a bit longer looking, decoding the images.

      • While I don’t think that forcing us to spend a bit longer looking is in any way good, you are right that the sequence makes more sense in the way it is. It’s about the childrens reaction to what their parents say, so, yeah, parents first, children second.

  • Lovely. Crafty miniatures. I like the authentic third dimension which is often fully abstracted, if there at all, in most infographics. Its appropriate for this.

  • And who would guess that statisticians would be teaching me art!

  • Passed this onto my marketing department…think it’s great!

  • jeffrey weir July 9, 2009 at 6:57 pm

    Yes, it’s great way to get across a message. No, it’s not a great way to present data in the case where a reader needs to make an accurate comparison between two variables…unless you give them two things very easy to compare. But then, that’s what a bar or line graph is for.

    Or Quoting from Stephen Few’s excellent new book “Now you see it”, color is good at drawing your attention to something if used sparingly, but is one of the ‘pre-attentive attributes’ that is not quantitatively percieved in and of themselves (quoting Few here again), and if overused tends to lose it’s ‘pre-attentive attribute’. Whereas lines and 2D precision are very precise ways to encode quantitative values.

  • these look good from saatchi, thank jeff weir for the S Few ideas about colour.