Graphicacy in 2021: Telling Stories that Matter
In a year when fiction often passed for fact, Graphicacy had the privilege of helping mission-driven organizations share important, engaging, and profound stories built on data for audiences around the world.
Whether raising awareness, shaping policy decisions, or driving action, the data visualization projects our team worked on in 2021 covered a spectrum of goals and issues. We drew tremendous inspiration collaborating with professionals devoted to improving the human condition on so many fronts.
We also grew our own team this year to continue delivering fresh, innovative solutions. Our talented new additions brought mutually supportive skill sets in data visualization, digital storytelling, software engineering, user experience, and visual design, to name a few.
We’ve put together a few highlights from our year of work below, including some of the attention our projects garnered from major media outlets. You’ll also get a sneak preview of projects we’re excited to launch in the early part of 2022 — our 10th year of operation.
COVID-19 and Public Health
Our relationship with Johns Hopkins University expanded with updates of two projects launched in 2020 focused on the coronavirus response.
As the pandemic evolves in our lives, the JHU Coronavirus Resource Center, which TIME magazine dubbed “2020’s Go-To Data Source,” continues to allow users to explore the current conditions of COVID-19 in their state and track progress via charts or map-based visualizations.
With the VIEW-hub data visualization platform for the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, our team worked to increase the focus on fast-moving COVID-19 vaccine research.
In November, The New York Times used VIEW-hub data as the basis for its article on waning vaccine effectiveness.
Equity in Education
We transformed research from the Postsecondary Value Commission into an interactive Equitable Value Explorer for the Institute for Higher Education Policy, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to a Forbes article from November, the tool aims to “help higher education leaders ‘know their numbers’ so they can implement evidence-based policies promoting economic mobility and social equity.”
Gender Disparities
With their RUN/51 initiative, Vote Run Lead is striving to establish female majorities in every state legislature by 2031. We developed an interactive scrollytelling tool that shows users how long it will take for their states to achieve that majority based on current data.
Sustainability
Graphicacy helped the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities paint a vivid picture of the urban services divide with the Seven Transformations for More Equitable and Sustainable Cities.
We had the honor of working with the WILDLABS team to visualize their first ever State of Conservation Technology Report. A December article in The New York Times called out the many ways technology teaches us about nature and the WILDLABS data.
On the global level, we also worked with the United Nation Foundation’s Digital Impact Alliance to create an interactive online Catalog of Digital Solutions. With this tool, the world’s development community can learn about digital technologies that could aid their efforts and see how others have applied them in specific use cases.
We’re proud of the work we produced in 2021 and we’re excited about the projects we have coming up in 2022 for The World Bank (gender data), American Institutes of Research (school segregation), and the Economic Innovation Group (economic growth and dynamism).
In our second decade, we look forward to helping more mission-driven organizations of all sizes visualize a better world, spark progress, and tell stories that matter.
Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design, and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the World Bank, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League, and many others.
