I was pretty active on Pinterest recently, looking for new inspiration. A couple of weeks ago I came across a series called City Facts. The common theme is, that they lay some useful information over the picture of the selected city, and it just looks awesome. Check it out on Tableau Public.
This one I made of Budapest is 90% done in Illustrator (the rest in Tableau), I collected the facts from Wikipedia and Numbeo. There are some basic tricks I did to make the viz look appealing and make it clear despite the visual noise. I made the map with the help of the pen tool, I just downloaded a pic from the internet, added it to my canvas and drew over it. The only pure white label on the visual is the title, everything else has at least 66% opacity. The other trick I made is to tone down the beautiful image of Timi Keszthelyi by placing a black rectangle with 40% opacity on top of the picture. This is how the visual looks with and without blackening. Just a simple shape, but such improvement!
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