Visualizing the ways COVID-19 has changed our team’s lives

Our team at Graphicacy has been fortunate during the pandemic to remain healthy and to continue to do what our team loves to do: use data visualization to help our clients communicate important issues.

We have had the honor of dedicating our team’s time over the last eight months to the serious work of visualizing the pandemic, working with the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. As their data visualization partner, we designed and engineered a suite of visualizations to better inform the public, policymakers and government officials as the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic.

For this post, we are focusing with a lighter touch on visualizing ways our team’s personal lives have been impacted by the pandemic. While we have all been spared the worst of the pandemic, our lives have changed in dramatic ways over the last 12 months. We have used different forms of data visualization to tell the story of how our lives have changed by way of the posts below.

Carni Klirs, Senior Information Designer — How COVID has shuttered the live music industry

Growing up in Washington, DC, live music has always been a huge part of my life. From high school, through college, into my 20s and now 30s, participating in the local music scene has been the one constant. When looking back at how my life has changed over the last year, one of the most notable changes is that the entire live music industry has been put on pause, leaving a big gap in how I spend my time and how I socialize.

To determine just how much of an absence it is, I compiled a small data set on the last few years of concerts, by looking back through my Google Calendar, and past Facebook events. While not exhaustive, this is a fairly accurate picture of how often I attended concerts: about one concert a week, until March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began shuttering venues across the country. In addition to counting the concerts themselves, I also marked on the chart the music venues that have now closed for good. Many more are barely hanging on.

To visualize the data, I designed a bar chart, styled in Adobe Illustrator, to evoke the volume display on a stereo, with each concert shown as a discreet block. I placed all three years together on the same X axis, so the dropoff in concerts attended is visible. Then, I added in annotation, to help the reader interpret the chart and allow it to work as a standalone graphic.

Christopher Lanoue, Director of Engineering and Innovation — Visualizing Activities Before/During COVID

For this radar chart visualization, I divided 2020 into three distinct time periods. In the first time period, which I have categorized as Pre-COVID, I was on a pretty routine schedule of commuting about 40 minutes (each way) from Brooklyn to Times Square via the F train, working, and spending about 30 minutes eating lunch each day in the office kitchen.

Once COVID began to run rampant throughout New York City, my family and I went to stay with my in-laws in Massachusetts to give the kids a bit more space to run around. During this time period, COVID (Summer), my commute was drastically reduced, but not to zero as I took a five-minute walk every morning around the neighborhood to clear my head. As my co-workers went virtual, I spent less time grabbing lunch or coffee and more time working and spending time with my family outside.

This trend continued until we returned to Brooklyn in August and I started to take coffee walks with friends to get fresh air. But as the weather got colder, I’ve definitely spent a good deal more time in front of screens than I would like.

To visualize the breakdowns of time spent on an assortment of activities over the last year, I created a React with D3.js custom visualization application, which is powered in real time behind the scenes from a Google Sheet and deployed via GitHub Pages. This technology stack, which is a common stack at Graphicacy, gives the admin of the visualization the ability to update any data points, content, or colors without redeploying or reworking any code.

Shing-Yun Chiang, Information Designer — Visualizing food delivery before and during the COVID pandemic.

Before the pandemic, I usually cooked at home and dined out with friends sometimes. I only ordered food delivery through apps when I really didn’t want to cook. Last year in late March the COVID pandemic began, and dining out was no longer the best way to enjoy different food. Affected by the fact that people working from home and not eating out as frequently as usual, more and more restaurants joined the food delivery service. Ordering food delivery became interesting to me as I have been avoiding going out.

Besides the most common services such as Uber Eats and DoorDash, I found a food delivery app, Chowbus, which offers long-distance delivery from Asian restaurants. As a Taiwanese, I enjoy using Chowbus to order bread and cakes from a Taiwanese bakery. I order from the bakery about once a week. The exploration of food delivery apps didn’t stop. I started to use Grubhub in late 2020 because of the benefits of my new credit card.

I noticed that I used food delivery service more frequently than before, but I didn’t realize the significant difference until I dug into the order history. In 2018, I only used Uber Eats and ordered two times; in 2020 I used four apps and ordered 71 times. Actually, the trend emerged from the holiday season in late 2019 and continued to grow through 2020. I used Adobe Xd to create the chart, and plotted each order on a monthly timeline. The orders were colored by the app I used. It’s interesting to see the number of orders going up with more apps added.

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’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the World Bank, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.