A Long Year

(Spring 2021) This large-scale data visualization served as my final design project of graduate school. Entitled “A Long Year,” this illustrated bar chart is a love letter to Randall Munroe’s XKCD and tells the narrative of 472 days in my life, starting on January 1st, 2020, and depicting how the world (and my personal life) dramatically changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For this final project, I opted to focus on the representation of data while making heavy use of scale to help tell stories about time and the physical spatial environment: emphasizing the ways the pandemic has induced moments of loss, loneliness, claustrophobia, and monotony, but also small moments of beauty, wonder, self-discovery, and love. All of the illustrations were hand-drawn by me, and the project was assembled piece by piece using a combination of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, taking almost 40 hours to complete in total.

Note: you may find it easier to view “A Long Year” by downloading it and viewing it in your native PDF application if it allows for full screen content. If using a mouse with a scroll wheel, “middle clicking” and dragging on the visualization below will allow you to more easily zoom and pan around.