This Infographic was put together by the JJ Roofing marketing dept apprentices as part of an exercise in planning, researching, designing and editing an infographic.
The Infographic
The Story of the Infographic
Sony's announcement of their new, huge 185Tb Tape Storage made us think of all the things that we could store on it and, when we took the idea to the rest of the marketing department, this became the germ of the idea for an Infographic.
The first task was to talk through the idea and get a logical series of comparisons so that people could begin to understand the amount of data that a single one of these tapes stores. Our base unit was €œthe selfie€ which we based on 150K ave file size, next was a 50Gb Blu-Ray Disc and the 5 discs per series that the first three series of Game of Thrones take up.
We wanted to compare music files as well and use an 8Mb ave file size to get a little over 24 million MP3s on a single tape. It was at that point that we realised that the official video for Pharrell Williams' €œHappy€ has 222,710,324 views on YouTube (as of 6th May 2014) and that, if everyone that watched the video got a digital copy of the song, you would still need 10 tapes to store all those tracks (If you did the same thing with Gangnam Style's 1.9 billion+ views, you'd need 82 tapes to store it all - That's a lot of views!)
We wanted a final comparison though to bring us back to the huge size of the tape backup and download speeds gave us something that everyone can understand. Using the speed baseline from Virgin Media http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/speeds-explained/index.html of 152mbps, we worked out that it would take over 112 days to download such a huge amount of data.
Once we got the idea, facts, figures and calculations together, we put it together in InDesign. We were, initially, going to base the infographic on the idea of the amount of data you can now fit on a mix tape, the 185Tb tape being an exponential development from the humble C90, which last saw service in car tape decks in an age before CD players and iPod connectivity. Instead we chose a simpler design which enabled us to reduce the amount of time it took to finish off the fine details while making the facts themselves the primary focus of the graphic.
This was an interesting learning experience and we hope that you find this information as fascinating as we did.
