Budget Breakdown Rational

It took a lot a brainstorming, but I eventually decided to do the DataVis on my spending. I chose this topic because of the wealth of data my online bank statement has; It collects the date, place, and amount of money I spend. I was curious to compare the amount of money I spend on my bills verse the amount of money I spend on food and entertainment. It was kind of an unpleasant realization that 64% of my money goes straight to bills and only 30% money is spent enjoying myself. After seeing that 64% goes to my bills/ living expenses I decided to crawl the University of Oregon’s registrar to see what percentage they predict the avg. student’s budget to be used on bills/living expenses.  After doing a simple computation, I found the University of Oregon’s registrar estimates a student should be spending 59% of their budget on bills/living expenses. With the awesome data set from my bank statement, I was able to break down my 30% into what I spend my money on most. Pretty much all of the spending I do on fun and entertainment is spent in one of five places: Beer, Pizza, Hamburgers, Burritos, and Chinese food. I think its worth saying the beer stat represents me a bar having a good time with friends.  I feel this break down gives you a good representation of how I like to spend my money when I’m having fun.

I struggle with designing things digitally, well pretty much design in general, but I did try my best to stick to the principals of graphic design: Balance, Proportion, and Emphasis.  I feel I created a pretty nice symmetric balance. I tried to have as many object on the right as the left. By offsetting my fun and entertainment graph on the right with the guy holding the barbell of bills and $, as well as offsetting the fun and entertainment tab on the left and the bills tab on the right, and the percentages on the top left middle and bottom right, I feel the DataVis is very balanced.

Proportion was a constant point of emphasis throughout my design process. The bigger the percentage got the bigger font. The clipart I used all had to make sense for their size. The guy holding the barbell I wanted to compete with the 64% stat, so I made him pretty big.  Since he was big, the chart breaking down my fun and entertainment also had to be of good size. Another thing I’m happy with is the overall weight and proportions to my text in relation to their importance, Its pretty subtle but Its that subtly that make all the difference.

I feel I did a good job of emphasizing important things in my DataVis. Whether it’s the title, the fun and entertainment and bills tab, my fun and entertainment chart emphasized by the arrow and magnifying glass, or the font size of the percentages that makes them some of the first things you see. For this being my very first DataVis, I feel like it covers all the basic principals of graphic design.  I hope you think so to.