Drugs
Published in print & scrollytelling
The primary objective and main challenge of the story was to captivate the audience with an old topic, that is still important and highly polarising: Drugs. Furthermore, we wanted to expose as many aspects of the issue as possible, moving through the story from the large, European scope to the very personal experience of drug use.
Very exciting! My first venture into scrollytelling.
Here’s the full version in its German original.
DATUM Magazine is heavily print-focused, and its art directors continuously explore how text and visual information is most effectively and beautifully presented. By running an 8-page infographic piece, it was imperative to present the visualisations in the same style as the natural flow of DATUM’s usual long-story text format pieces.
In order to appeal to a broader audience than just our traditional print readership, we intended to publish the story also as a “scrollytelling” story, optimised for mobile, tablet, and desktop.
the visual foundation
By introducing a common framework at the start of the story, which categorised various substances by its effects (stimulants, anti-psychotics, hallucinogens, sedatives) into colours, we established a visual language that remained a constant throughout all further data visualisations. This was an important step, as it added a layer of complexity to all data visualisations without becoming over-complicated.
Data sources
We wanted to explore this topic using modern metrics and data from:
1. Intra-European wastewater studies on substances
2. Google Trends data
3. Previously unavailable police and autopsy data
4. Text analysis data of online forums
None of these sources were available or established 5-10 years ago, but provide highly illuminating information into the state of drug use in the 21st century.
how are drugs connected?
The centrepiece of the work is the network visualisation of drug use, based on a homemade dataset of forum posts on drug-related experiences. When two or more drugs were mentioned together in a post, they created links to each other. We then mapped out over 10,000 of these posts to visualise how closely different drugs are connected to each other.
Analog data viz
Finally, we wanted to show that data visualisation need not always present hard, numerical data. In this case, we opted for an original, “analog” visualisation of peoples’ experiences when using drugs. By superimposing drug-users’ drawings of their subjective experiences, we were able to highlight visual patterns in the effects that users feel in their bodies.