During the last days of 2013 Ingrid and me (working together as Rekall Design) decided to send our clients a little thank you for working with us the past year. Although we didn’t have a lot of time, we still wanted to do something more original than the typical Christmas card.
We build sites, so we thought our clients would be interested to see how their website was used in the past year. That’s how we came up with the idea to send each client a personalized poster visualizing the daily number of visitors in 2013. Here are some of the results. (Site names and number of visitors censored for privacy reasons.)
Each ray in the poster represents one day. The more visitors on that day, the longer the line is. This poster is for a website back in January, so those short lines in January, February and the beginning of March are us and the client’s team setting up the site. Then in the middle of March the site was launched with a press conference – that’s why there are some very long lines there.
This is a website for a school. Summer months are very quiet, and the start of the academic year is clearly visible. Outliers correspond to events important to the school, for example open days.
And this poster is for an artist’s site. The graph hints at what were important events in 2013 for this client: exhibitions, lectures, etc.
Technical details:
- Data was tracked using Google Analytics. We used PHP and Zend Framework to automate downloading and conversion to CSV. Code for ga2csv is available on GitHub.
- The data was then visualized in Processing. The sketch reads in the CSV files and outputs a PDF with vector data for each site.
- Finishing touches were done in Illustrator.