Infographic: Telling a visual story through icons and data.
An academic project to research and design an icon set and infographic for Pearl Jam using Spotify and band data sets.
Introduction
This was an academic project to create an infographic through iterative information design. I selected a topic that I am passionate about: one of my favorite bands, Pearl Jam. You’ll see in the research section below that my topic started out much wider than where I ended up after narrowing my focus.
Objective & Research Topic
The primary goal of this project was to create an informative and entertaining Pearl Jam infographic designed to demonstrate my personal appreciation of the band, while informing others about Pearl Jam song and listener statistics.
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To guide my research, I wanted to explore a question that I thought might have an interesting answer.
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“Is there any correlation between what Pearl Jam songs people listen to on Spotify and the songs most frequently played live at concerts?"
Research Process
The original question I actually set out to answer in the beginning was much bigger: “Which Grunge Rock band was more influential in the ‘90s: Pearl Jam or Nirvana?”
This wider focus seemed promising as I looked at Spotify data. I was surprised to learn that even though Nirvana has not been a band since 1994, they had a much higher Spotify rank, more monthly listeners, and more followers than Pearl Jam, who are still active today. But Spotify data was not enough to answer such a potentially subjective question.
To dive deeper, I began researching both bands from a statistical perspective outside of Spotify. Pearl Jam has a cult-like fan base who track Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam concerts and statistics religiously. I started out on a statistical site, pjdb.net specialising in all Pearl Jam show, setlist, song, and album statistics. I consider the obsessive fans maintaining this site to be experts in their field, providing a high level of data integrity. There are several other generic sites that attempt to track these kinds of statistics for many bands, but with discrepancies.
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I considered the fans maintaining pjdb.net to be experts in their field, providing a high level of data integrity.
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Next, I concluded that finding data on album sales might be a good place to make comparisons, but this proved difficult to find quality data for either band in this area. At this stage I also started to doubt that making a comparison between a band that still performs today, and a band that stopped performing back in the 90’s would introduce a lot of complexity to answering my original question.
As I moved on to research Nirvana’s statistics, I found a much thinner data set with questionable integrity when compared to Pearl Jam. Because of this, and the inability to effectively compare album sales, I decided to narrow my focus on Pearl Jam alone.
When I reviewed the data set I compiled from Spotify, pjdb.net, and my own personal show statistics, I concluded a focus on comparisons and correlations between these three could form an interesting infographic, which led me to the question, “Is there any correlation between what Pearl Jam songs people listen to on Spotify and the songs most frequently played by Pearl Jam at shows?”.
Insights
What I learned was that when looking for the relationship between the top 6 songs most frequently played at shows and the top 6 songs most frequently listened to on Spotify, there was only a 50% match. (Focusing on the top 6 was a deliberate design decision because I wanted to incorporate this into the guitar on the infographic, which has 6 strings for 6 bars in the graph.)
Although there is some correlation there, I expected this match to be a higher percentage, so this was an interesting result. When looking deeper, however, I noticed the top Pearl Jam listeners on Spotify are from South America, where Pearl Jam has only performed less than 4% of their shows.
This helps explain the low correlation. Perhaps if the top listeners on Spotify were also those attending the most shows, the correlation between these would be much higher. If I had more time, I would look into what songs were played at the South America shows to see if there is high correlation from that perspective.
Icon Set Design
As a part of the project brief, I was required to design a full cohesive icon set to incorporate into the infographic. This was a lot of fun! I was surprised how much I enjoyed minimalist design.
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I started by getting as many ideas down on paper as I could, and then moved into some quick sketching.
From there I moved to Illustrator and began iteratively developing each icon. Here's a few examples.
Infographic Design & Iteration
My starting point was with an idea for the focal point of my infographic: a guitar. I wanted this to be meaningful and visually interesting, so I came up with an idea to use the fretboard and strings as a bar graph.
In later iterations, I saw other opportunities to show graphs on different guitar parts. My final infographic evolved into a mock schematic of a guitar, with each part representing a different statistic. This ended up being a unique and effective way to show the data.
I started with a basic paper sketch and then imported to illustrator.
Then I started adding color, depth, shading, and layers.
I thought the frets and strings of the guitar could make great graph visualization. I adjusted the color, matching a Pearl Jam album cover color codes.
Returning to my data set and sticking with the guitar "schematic" theme, I started adding in states pointing at different components of the guitar.
I continued to add in more data sets, and worked in some data comparisons. Categories are color coded with a legend.
Some feedback I got was to include a picture of the band or make the guitar the lead singer's guitar to tell a better story. I completely agree and would make this change if I were to do a similar project.
I continued to improve shading, layer, and depth of the guard and balance the graphs and data on the poster.
Final Infographic
Reflection
I learned a lot during this project. This was my first time using Adobe Illustrator. I'm relatively happy with how my infographic and icons turned out, but there is always room for improvement. Adding in band specific images or iconography would have enhanced the narrative for fans.
The amount of information displayed is a little cluttered. A different research topic might have had a stronger narrative, captivated a wider audience, or answered some more interesting questions. But that is why discovery is so valuable: your assumptions are not always going to be correct up front.
I learned how to design an icon set, and create an infographic rooted in research. Finally, I was able to come up with a creative way to display data within a given theme.
Data sources
• Spotify. (2019). Spotify Desktop Application (Version 1.1.21.1654.g282a2807) [Desktop application software]. Retrieved from https://www.spotify.com/nz/download/windows/
• Pjdb. (no date). Pearl Jam song statistics. Retrieved from https://www.pjdb.net/songs.php?
• Pjdb. (no date). Pearl Jam album statistics. Retrieved from https://www.pjdb.net/albums.php?
• Pjdb. (no date). Pearl Jam show statistics. Retrieved from https://www.pjdb.net/shows.php?
• Pearl Jam. (2019). Band. Retrieved from https://pearljam.com/band
• Pearl Jam. (2019). Acts. Retrieved from https://pearljam.com/acts