Press report from Ministry of Economic Development got published with price changes in 2009. On May 14 this report will be presented on press conference.
We (me, Max Gorbachevskiy, and Valentin Kasyanova) were able to work on the statistics in the Federal Statistics Service and make it more readable for this report. Style and design of the diagrams was developed Mildberry agency.
It was initiated by the Department of Development of Competition — Alexander Pirozhenko is its head. You can find his blog on Live Journal. Also, you can find there an official announce of the event.
Before:
After:
Of course we didn’t create Gapminder on Russian statistics and won’t create soon. It’s just a static report and how prices changed on different product categories.
We decided not to go with beautiful illustrations and graphic works (such as maize) — the audience accustomed to traditional methods of communication and we needed people to read the report seriously.
The main thing we did — we redesigned the structure of information presentation.
1. We separated text from graphs (in the original version, text was interspersed with diagrams).
2. We unified the types of graphs. For each type of information different graph: one for change in price, one for change in production, and third for a regional split (you won’t believe it — we used for it the map of Russia:-)).
3.We took out macroeconomic indicators and summary statistics and located it on a separate sheet. Because it should be always in front of the reader — it does not matter what product he/she is studying right now (milk, flour, or fish), front page will always be there too.
I’m publishing only one spread, just for an example:
I consider this work as very important milestone for both — for the Ministry of Economic Development and for information design. For the Ministry of Economic Development, because they are closer to people and modern trends. For infographics in general (and for me in particular), because this is just the first small step to the huge store of information that RosStat and GosKomStat have and in need of visualization.
