Property Snakes and Ladders
On 12 February the Evening Standard was splashed with our poll findings on the housing crisis. As always, we published full details on our website but also prepared commentary pieces for the Standard and Inside Housing. In doing so we described the multi-faceted nature of the crisis and public opinion on it, indicating that public attitudes contained some contradictions, conflicts and challenges.
We had long known this, but the Standard poll gave extra impetus to an idea we had had late last year. The idea was to visualise data from several Ipsos surveys in one go, and in a way which allowed us to lay findings next to each other to compare-and-contrast. Because our polls generate percentages, a numbers-based board game with plenty of squares fitted the bill, and ‘Snakes and Ladders’ matched the topic perfectly. A colleague saw an earlier draft and commented that he kept coming back to it and finding something new. That was the intention; to create a reference resource suitable for the desktop (both electronic and physical).
While the visualisation was designed to be stand-alone, we provided additional commentary highlighting findings presented on key squares, which was picked up on by the Guardian among others:
“For example, compare the 80% and 45% squares. The public senses a national crisis but less so a local one. Indeed, the overwhelming majority are content with their homes (see squares 89% and 91%), and many don’t see supply as an issue. See square 45% again where this percentage disagree that more new homes need to be built locally.
Further compare this with 49% and 63%; nearly half the public think there has already been over-development locally and most over-estimate how much of the country is already built upon.
The 82% and 40% squares show that housing is a priority for Government attention, so too is building homes over other infrastructure projects. But these, and the sense of crisis, sit far above the 8% square…”
Of course, our visualisation only touches the surface of a crisis which plays out differently by age, area and tenure. But, as a summary, we hope it brings attention to one of the most important economic and social issues of our times, and the significance of public opinion and aspirations within this.
Designer's Note
by Tom Warren
We’ve been doing infographics for over a year now, and by infographics I mean using charts and tables to show the data as a step up from what’s possible in PowerPoint. But this was one of the few ‘visualisations’ we’ve done. And by that I mean, we were re-imagining the data with one theme and in one execution, which is more difficult to pull off than a standard infographic, but far more satisfying when it works as well as this one.
This one needed a combination of the entire Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign). The snakes and ladders were obviously the main visual feature, but I was conscious that, while it may be easy to create a snake going from one square to another in Illustrator, what happens when I get the inevitable call asking me to move it - I’d need to redraw the snake/ladder every time. I got around this problem by using a pattern brush to create the body, head and tail of the snake and apply it to a stroke so that every time I moved the stroke it redrew the snake for me! Perfect! I then used the same process to create the ladders.
I wanted to make this visualisation look as much like an actual boardgame as possible. In keeping with this, it was really important to me that the background captured that classic board game texture I remembered from playing snakes and ladders as a kid. The printed version we prduced was even folded like a traditional board, so the end user felt like they could almost play with it at their desk.
This was a really fun project to be involved in, and the response on the web and Twitter has been great. It’s even made it into the homepage gallery on visual.ly
