See also:

• History of a Chart 2. “Rock V The World”
• History of a Chart 3. “Where Did All the Rockstars Go?”
• History of a Chart 4. “This is the New Flesh”
• History of a Chart 5. “Guess What?”

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Inspiration: WorldOfViolence,  Globalize me! : JUNG + WENIG , Nicholas Felton, es / Books / Personal
Kurt Kranz Urs Hofer , Flags By Colours 

(click to view full interactive chart)

The critics may claim that rock is dead, but there could be life in the electric guitar yet.

We are undeniably in a rock slump, with rock albums performing at their worst for 10 years. However, we saw similar poor showings in the 80s and 90s, and  rock always fought back.

The popularity of prog and folk in the early 1970’s saw rock dominate around 60% of the album charts, but by 1978 disco had forced that down to 43%. However, by the early 80s rock was back on top as the New Wave movement took hold, then to be hit once again by the commercial pop explosion and then, a double drop when house music took hold.

The pattern continues in this way, through the rise of Britpop and the modern successes of Green Day, The Killers and British indie rock bands such as Kaiser Chiefs, with rock always fighting back from a slump with a sudden rise in interest.

With 2010 seeing the worst performance for rock albums in the charts for a decade, are we in one of those slumps now, and is there a new rock craze waiting to revive the genre and take it back to chart glory?

Idea

I had been working through various versions of this chart, using rollover panels to show various sets of information for each year as well as the values for other genres. I decided to split this information into 2 separate charts (see History of a Chart 2. “Rock V The World”) for simplicity.

I wanted to show the highs and lows of the rock scene over the past 40 years, with some specific information – e.g. top selling artists, % of charts as rock, etc. I felt this would be an engaging chart for the user and would hold attention. (Ideally every year would be interactive, not just the highs and lows, but time restricted this).

Method

1. Within Tableau Desktop I create the basic bar chart (with genre filtered to just rock), with Numbers of Records on the Y axis, and Year on X.

I then put imagined myself in the shoes of the user. What extra information would I like to see on the chart?

I decided to illustrate the most successful artists of each year, the % of rock in charts and a circular date chart showing when rock was at number 1 in the album charts.

The % of chart as rock was created using the Pie chart setting, with colour set to genre (with All genres except rock grouped and coloured as black, and rock set as red), and Angle was Measure Value. With The X axis as Year, this created one pie chart for every year.

To edit, re-colour and manipulate the charts, I selected “Print to PDF”, and opened the PDF in Illustrator, and then in Flash to create the rollover buttons/animation.

Evolution

Below I talk through some of the stages and decisions I made.

Inspiration: The STEM Dilemma,

Idea: Was to create an all encompassing chart for both different genre lines and rock artists. I was also drawn to the idea of the barchart as an industrial skyline, so wanted to create the idea of Smoke emerging from them.

Method: (see History of a Chart 2. for how I created the rollover line chart).

I sourced the top 5 artists per year by using Tableau to filter, calculate and sort the information. The black circles were created in Illustrator, using a simple process – each value had a corresponding, and very simple, size. So, 140 units = 140pixels (sq) in size. I would apply this to all circles, and the key, then resize ALL as necessary to fit the chart. The relation stays the same and the key still works.

Why Ditched: Overly complicated. Errors in data. Style over usability.

Inspiration: McCandless “Media Jungle”

The Idea: A static chart that showed easily the major events and interests in Pop music that kept rock out of the spotlight over time.

The Method: Using Wikipedia and other websites to research this, I placed the major events on “flagpoles” emerging from the barchart. These showed showing key albums, deaths, events to affect music.

Inspiration: music-family-tree,

Idea: To create a rollover chart showing the various key moments in music. The black area would show the rock highlights, the white, non-rock.

Method: Adding to the data I researched for the above chart, I then created a series of rollover buttons (in Flash CS5) from the YEAR tab, and for the “over” function, showed the information.

Why Ditched: Too cluttered and unclear. Hard to distinguish between Rock and Non-Rock. Space restricted amount of data so each year looked sparse until ALL option was displayed. Users asked if the placement on Y axis was relevant. It wasn’t but the axis suggested it may be.  The text data was also a little vague. I decided to drop the text and switch to numerical data and charts instead.