Flexible Trees allow for creating tree visualizations to fit a desired shape by using sketch-based interaction. It offers a simple way of generating tree layouts for infographic purposes by adding a meaningful shape to a tree visualization.
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
How It Started
What I Contributed
For the first use case, I tried to contextualize a tree visualization by creating the shape of an object that is related to the topic. I chose the shape of a coffee cup that hints at the topic of the tree within the cup: the various coffee aromas provided by the SCAA Flavor Wheel.
Add Quantitative Data
I also wanted to incorporate more data in the shape of the tree. After some testing, I decided on a pie charts. While definitely being controversial, they’re still one of the most popular visualizations. The pie chart shows the top causes of death for the United States, Germany, and India (Source: WorldLifeExpectancy). The shapes of the slices add further quantitative data: slice angles represent birth rates for each country. In addition to conveying the information contained in the trees, this infographic puts the information in perspective by also comparing the areas of the trees in the pie chart.
Add Context, Qualitative, And Quantitative Data
Combining all approaches led to trees whose color distribution and slice angles represent the impact of each cause of death on the total percentage of deaths. (Source: WorldLifeExpectancy) The shape, furthermore, adds information to the tree: it conveys the country that the data is related to. Filling parts of the countries also conveys quantities like a pie chart does.
What The Progress Was Like
After having found suitable data to turn into a tree visualization, I transformed the data into a format that the algorithm could read. I ran the algorithm with the data on a computer that supported pen input which I used to draw the outline for the tree adaption. The output of the algorithm consisted of an image that gave me the foundation for the infographics. Consequently, I imported the output images into Adobe Illustrator and used Illustrator as well as Adobe Photoshop to create the infographic based on the output image of the algorithm.
Lessons Learned And Further Information
Javad Sadeghi, Charles Perin, Tamara Flemisch, Mark Hancock, and Sheelagh Carpendale. 2016. Flexible Trees: Sketching Tree Layouts. In Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 84–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2909132.2909274