Highest Life Expectancy by Country and Diet Composition

I'm interested in exploring health and wellness across the globe. This inspired the dataset I ended up using in this course by Federica Fragapane.

I tried a lot of different software to try to put this project together. I tried creating some of my pie charts in Excel, I tried to use the SmartArt feature in PowerPoint to create my hierarchy. These didn't play well with Illustrator, though, so I ended up working the same workflow as the course videos. I used RAWGraphs for the hierarchy, and I pretty much used Illustrator for everything else. I used Excel to put my dataset together and filter it to the top 10.

I wanted to look at diet composition to see if there were any patterns between diet composition and lifespan. I used ourworldindata.org to get both datasets. After merging and cleaning the dataset, I ended up with way too much data. At first I narrowed it down to the top 55, because I wanted enough to compare the top 10 to, but that was still too much, so I narrowed it down to the top 10 just to keep it manageable for this project.

After I designed the graph, I realized I could actually add additional pie charts under each country to continue exploring what might be connected to lifespan, such as micronutrients, exercise/activity levels, and social connectedness. There's lots of room to expand on this graphic!

I do feel like I ended up focusing too much on the data and not enough on the design. Once I had my graph together and my pie charts weren't all in black and white (all which took forever), I didn't love the way it looked at all but also wasn't sure how to make the design more appealing. At minimum, I probably should go back and get a better defined color scheme. But in terms of visuals, I wasn't really sure what is a good representation of lifespan and diet. My original idea was to use emojis to represent the different dietary categories but there were so many categories and not enough room to make emojis large enough to be distinguishable. During this project, I also learned a lot about using Illustrator. I'm much more familiar with using Photoshop so it was actually a pretty steep learning curve because the functions I'm used to accessing and typically rely on either don't exist or aren't where I expect them to be.

Overall, this was a great project for getting my feet wet both with data visualization and learning the tools! I'm excited to continue developing this project but also starting new ones and continuing to explore all the great resources I got from this course.

Unfortunately, I missed the steps documenting the whole process, so I can only describe what I did.