Archive: Sports
February 15, 2010, 4:01 pm
Cressey Performance Web Site Relaunches
by Henry Woodbury
Our latest web site design is for Cressey Performance in nearby Hudson, Massachusetts. Cressey Performance is a weight-training gym with an international reputation for its work with competitive athletes, from youth sports to professionals. Directed by the highly-respected Eric Cressey, the facility is a go-to training destination for professional baseball players, including Kevin Youkilis of the Boston Red Sox, as well as other elite athletes such as 2010 USA Olympic Bobsledder Bree Schaaf.
The site is designed around a tight core of informational pages about the facility, while a new CP Blog provides an ongoing venue for current news, training videos, and links to the top stories at the separate blogs maintained by Eric Cressey and staff nutritionist Brian St. Pierre.
July 3, 2009, 9:39 am
Innovation at Wimbledon
by Henry Woodbury
The most visible innovation is the retractable roof over Centre Court.
But this year’s Wimbledon Championships at the All England Club is also host to several IT innovations, most dramatically a smartphone application that superimposes match data on top of the phone’s video display.
IBM, Wimbledon’s long-term IT partner, developed the “Seer Android” app for the T-Mobile G1 mobile phone:
Pointing a G1 phone at a court, for example, would tell the user the court number, details of the current and previous matches and Twitter comments from experts and players, such as Andy Murray and Roger Federer.
The championship’s first official Twitter feeds are also up and running at @Centre_Court and @Wimbledon.
June 30, 2009, 1:00 pm
How Tall is the Green Monster?
by Henry Woodbury
Flip Flop Fly Ball is Craig Robinson’s collection of “baseball infographics”:
Essentially, this site is what I’d have been doing when I was 12 years old had the Internet and Photoshop been available to me in the eighties.
What stands out for me from this collection is Robinson’s ability to ask good questions — intriguing or amusing or both.
In some of the work, the question is more the point than the answer. What if baseball players literally stole bases? For more complex questions Robinson often produces just a well-drawn pie or bar chart. But occasionally, Robinson combines question, data, and visual idea into a smart visual explanation that goes beyond that.
For example, the left field wall in Fenway Park is 37 feet and two inches tall. And how tall is that?
June 2, 2009, 1:08 pm
The Break of the Curve
by Henry Woodbury
Here is a very cool optical illusion — with an equally interesting (to me) real-world example.
December 29, 2008, 3:20 pm
The Year in Pictures
by Henry Woodbury
Almost every newspaper web site has a mesmerizing show.
The New York Times arranges their collection by category. I prefer the chronological order — and startling juxtapositions — of The Boston Globe’s collection (part 2, part 3).
Sports, politics, war, and disaster predominate, but some of my favorite pictures are those of science and nature, such as this photo from The Boston Globe:
June 4, 2008, 12:37 pm
Olympic Medals: Small is Beautiful
by Lisa Agustin
With the Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the Economist’s Daily Chart presents a different way of considering wins per country. Using the 2004 Athens Olympics as an example, the typical approach is to show the total number of medals won by each country. As one might expect, the bigger “superpower” countries make up the top ten. But slicing the data a different way — in this case, medals per million citizens — puts the Bahamas in first place. It’s an interesting take; an added plus would have been some reference to total populace for each of these smaller countries to put it all in perspective.
August 5, 2007, 5:57 pm
Around the Bases — 500 Times
by Henry Woodbury
I’ve often been critical of New York Times interactive graphics, but this one works for me, a chart of home runs by age for the 22 Major League Baseball players who have hit 500 or more. Hank Aaron’s line in bold red is the default. A mouse rollover on any other line highlights it and identifies the player responsible.
For followers of baseball, the most statistically-minded of sports fans, each line on the chart tells a story: the injuries that cut down the output of Mickey Mantle; the lost years of Ted William’s career when he served in WWII; the late start of Mike Schmidt; the early decline of Jimmie Foxx; the extraordinary consistency of Hank Aaron.
August 4, 2007, 3:14 pm
A Beautiful Orbit
by Henry Woodbury
A foam boomerang with LED lights creates a beautiful visual explanation showing the path and rotation of the device from launch to landing. The picture accompanies a Popular Mechanics article on the sport and science of boomerang throwing.
August 10, 2006, 1:58 pm
Animations, Small Multiples and Alex Rodriguez
by Henry Woodbury
Baseball fans may be interested in this analysis of Alex Rodriguez’s current power dropoff.
Visual explanation fans may be interested in swing instructor Jeff Albert’s use of video clips (in the form of animated gifs) and small multiples to support his analysis. The video clip discussion, focused on subtle differences in hip rotation, is fairly technical. More interesting, visually, is Albert’s use of spray charts as small multiples. A spray chart is a scale diagram of a ballpark with a player’s hitting denoted by location and outcome (g for groundout, f for flyout, s for single, h for home run, etc.). Presenting spray charts from 2002 to 2006 (2004-2006 reproduced below), Albert shows that Rodriguez’s home run sprays look different when he is hitting better.
July 21, 2006, 4:04 pm
The World Cup on Mobile Phone
by Henry Woodbury
It’s like the early days of Web design, but more so. This Design Interact article describes how Yahoo planned and delivered its mobile device site for the 2006 World Cup. The goal was to make a site that could work on as many browser-enabled phones as possible. The problem was the baffling idiosyncrasies of those devices:
“The Web browsers on phones vary from basic to super basic,” explains Keith Saft, senior interaction designer at Yahoo! Mobile. “They also have these eccentric bits of HTML and CSS that they don‘t support, and there aren‘t really any standards or consistency across phones.“
As they catalogued the technical limitations of mobile browsers, the Yahoo team created a design strategy that prioritized usability:
With production also came usability testing. And here, surprisingly enough, the team did not try to achieve perfect layout and content consistency on every phone. Instead, it wanted to make sure that users understood something it called “design intent.“
Do users navigate efficiently through the site? Do they understand how items are grouped on a screen? Can they retrieve the information they want? “Design intent” is design by information architecture.
June 8, 2006, 1:25 pm
Bar Graphs at Em Height
by Henry Woodbury
In his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence (2006), Edward R. Tufte explores the idea of “sparklines,” simple graphs whose y-axis is scaled to the height of a line of text. A draft chapter of Beautiful Evidence provides many examples of the concept and is accompanied by additional comments from Tufte and others.
I came across sparklines on David Pinto’s Baseball Musings site, where he has recently experimented with text-height graphs for such data sets as strikeouts per game (Jason Schmidt) and hits per game (Joe Mauer vs. Alex Rios).
Pinto credits Joe Gregorio who created the Baseball Musings sparklines on his online image generator. Gregorio, in turn, links to Tufte.
April 7, 2005, 1:27 pm
Game Flows and Shot Charts
by d/D
The sports pages have long inspired dense presentations of information, most uniquely in the form of the box score. Now, many online sports venues are turning statistics into interactive charts and visuals. Consider the “Game Flow” chart in this recap of the recent NCAA Division I College Basketball Championship (scroll down and mouse over):
http://sports-att.espn.go.com/ncb/recap?gameId=254000063
Another example is the interactive shot chart that ESPN creates for each National Basketball Association game: