We must have reached some weird kind of new level here in the offices of Graphics24, where I’m consulting here in Johannesburg. Nearly every day, we’re producing something interesting and new.
Graphics24 editor Andre Gouws checks out artist Rudi Louw
as Rudi works on his next cool piece. Note how the boss is NOT
leaning over Rudi’s shouder and touching his monitor.
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Take today, for instance. Artist Rudi Louw created this graphic showing all 12 official languages in South Africa.
“Native Speakers in South Africa,” the headline says. Across the top are circle graphs depicting the number of speakers of each of the country’s languages, paired with a file photo of a typical speaker of that language.
Afrikaans — the language in which this group of newspapers publishes and mostly speaks — is third-largest. English — depicted by a little fellow who looks a lot like Rowan Atkinson — is way down at No. 5.
The section at bottom left shows the top languages in each of the country’s nine provinces. At bottom right is a “word cloud” that shows the word “thank you” in all 12 languages.
The graphic ran on the op-ed page of today’s die Burger of Cape Town.
Nicely-done.
I wrote about Rudi’s work a couple of weeks ago on a giant U2 concert preview. I’ve also featured work this department has done on breaking news topics, rugby and cricket graphics and, yesterday, on a U2 concert follow-up piece.
And then there was this amusing op-ed graphic from last November.
These folks are doing some fine work. I’m so very proud of them.
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I’m in my third month of consulting for a chain of South African dailies and Sunday papers to help improve their use of visual journalism. Go here to find a directory of previous blog posts about my trip.
Another nice design. Double check your pie labels, I think the color coding is off on a couple. Still, your folks are doing some first-class work. They should be proud of the new direction their papers are heading, fueled by their work.
Ha! Interesting you picked up on that so quickly, Ken. That was my comment on Monday as well. In fact, there is no color-coding at all in this chart. But it LOOKS as if there is.
I had Rudi build a second version in which he used 12 distinct (yet, sophisticated) colors and used them consistently among the three segments of this graphic. But then after I left Monday night, they made a decision to go back to their original version.
Nice work. Lots of life in those pages. Even more with your influence, I am sure.
Charles, I would love to the second draft that didnt get published.