An odd email landed in our inbox today (thanks David!). It was something that looked gorgeous, but we couldn’t quite figure out what it was exactly. A tweet went out from our @beautifulpixels, but again, our followers couldn’t discern the fine details in this otherwise magnificent looking data chart. Thankfully, twitter connected us with its designer Filip Chudzinski, who graciously supplied us with the full resolution graphic.
I was blown away with what I saw.
What Chudzinski has done, is meticulously plotted out the entire ten year history of the iTunes ecosystem in a radial chart, down to the last detail. It plots all the important events, sales records, and press announcements of all the iPods, AppleTVs, iPhones, along with each version of iTunes, all on this one single radial chart. Mind you, it’s a huge chart, so big that you can’t even view half the chart on a 24-inch monitor at 100%. This chart needs to be printed out, framed, and hung on a glorious white wall to truly appreciate the work that has gone into it.
It’s still scaled down, but you can see the kind of detail I’m talking about.
I was curious, as to why someone would take such a huge undertaking. Filip tells me he’s not just an Apple fan, but is fascinated by Information Visualization and Information Graphics, a subject he’s currently studying. But he insists that was just part of the reason. “Sometimes you want to do something for yourself, that has nothing to do with your academical background, or your job, or your freelance activities — I hope you know what I mean.” He’s passionate for sure. He in fact started this project years ago with just the iPod in mind, as he pointed me to version 1.0 of this chart (spoiler: it’s not so good). He’s been working on version 2 for a year now, designing in Illustrator, and publishing it in InDesign; it’s all vector graphics so it can scale to as large as you want. He hopes to have the final version ready by the end of November, but he’s not committing to any dates.
So what next? I assumed he had monetary plans for this; printing it and shipping to eager fanboys; I’d certainly have bought one. Sadly, he currently has no plans to print posters, though he’s not opposed to the idea. On the flip side, anyone will be able to download it and print it out on their own!
So what about you, oh dear reader? Well, for now all you can do is wait till the graphic is completed. There are Desktop and iPhone wallpapers available for download, but without the information there’s no sex. Yep, all you can do is follow @choreographics on twitter and wait for when he makes his big announcement.