We gave a previous web design project a face-lift earlier this year — a rare luxury amid the rapid pace of design work these days. Since creating the site last year, GE has been amassing an inspiring collection of data visualization projects on their Making Data Work blog, and the expanding volume called for a slight update in layout and architecture.

There’s now extensive room for growth on the site — both in projects and categories — and we’re looking forward to seeing it!

We just launched TriTrack, a tool for triathlon training, on the behalf of GE and British Triathlon Elite Team Partner.

Signing up is free and takes a few seconds.

TriTrack stores time, pace, distance, and diet for your exercise program…

…and visualizes your progress.

The thickness of the colored bar indicates how much distance you covered in each training session. The slope of the line tells you what happened to your pace over time. If your pace improved, the line will slope downward. A steep downward slant means you rapidly improved your pace. A slighter slant shows that you improved steadily over time.

You can also see Pace and Level of Exertion, Pace and Quality of Sleep, and Pace and Diet+Nutrition. Each colored bar represents a day.

Level of exertion is represented with a color spectrum that goes from blue (lower exertion) to green (higher exertion).

How quality of sleep corresponds to your training is shown by green bars for the days when you reported better sleep the night before. Blue bars show poorer quality of sleep.

For nutrition, green bars indicate that you checked off all the diet and nutrition benchmarks mentioned on the training entry form (three square meals, five servings of fruit and three glasses of water). Blue bars show days where you reached none of these benchmarks. The gradient in between, indicate that the three goals were partially met.

Also tracked by TriTrack:

- Time Trained per Week

- Total time (in minutes) per week that you’ve spent training.

- Time Trained per sport per week

- Time (in minutes) that you’ve spent on each of the three activities—swimming, biking and running.

While building Stats of the Union, we went through a large heap of sketches. Some were mistakes. Others looked good, but didn’t do the job. While a favorite design can be worthy of endless defense, more often—killing is key.

In 1916, the British writer and English professor Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (pen name Q) coined the term “murder your darlings” in a lecture at Cambridge University, UK.

“Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament…. Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

If something is a darling because it makes the creator feel clever and impressive—it has to go. That’s what the audience should feel and it goes as much for design as it does for writing. But sometimes a piece is a darling because it has something special that can be useful in a different context. That’s why we don’t actually murder our darlings. We keep them in the basement.

In what we hope is the start of a tradition, we’d like to share some of our Kill Darlings from recent projects. Things we liked, but didn’t quite make it out the door in the final version. For Stats of the Union, we wanted to share our process of arriving at the final color palette—a task that left dozens of designs on the cutting room floor.

Our challenge was to arrive at a color palette that showed off geographic trends in the data. We were seeking to minimize flattening in the final piece. While it might be easy to distinguish between “high” and “low” on a map, we wanted the subtle gradations between “slightly high” and “really high” to also be apparent.

We started with spectrums of a single hue, but ultimately decided they didn’t have enough contrast to show the highs and lows in the data properly. We moved to the split color spectrum that exists in the final piece. It became immediately apparent that interpolating through HSB color space was a bad idea. As was this brief black and white episode.

Other color pairings worked more successfully together, but were not balanced, such as this green and purple option. Other combinations had unavoidable connotations already attributed to them.

Finally we settled on blue and green for their ability to sit next to one another without one of them stealing the show. Shifting the background to a true black seemed heavy-handed on a monitor, but in testing on the iPad itself the colors practically glowed.

Our first iPad app is now available on iTunes.

It’s called Stats of the Union, and we built it for GE as a tool to look at health stories in America.

Stats of the Union is powered by the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) report from 2009, which consists of data from federal agencies including the Census Bureau, Department of Health & Human Services, Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency.

With all this data you can look at population, risk factors, and indicators of health. Zoom in to get the specific data for a county. Zoom out and compare your county to an overview for each state or for the whole country.

You can go directly to any story you want, but it’s interesting to first get an overview of U.S. demographics. See where the population is dense, old, young and learn where America is predominantly black, white or Hispanic.

Then get an overview of the nation’s health: life expectancy, causes of death, poor or fair health and sick days.

You can break out health indicators related to birth (low birth weight, premature births etc.)…

…or see specific causes of death (homicide, car crashes, heart disease etc.)…

… or look at patterns of at-risk groups for health related problems (unemployment, major depression, recent drug users etc.)

Under “Diseases” in the navigation bar, you find statistics on certain diseases (E.coli, Salmonella, Hepatitis) as well as preventative procedures (mammograms, flu shots etc.).

Under Risk Factors, you can view prevalence of behavior (no exercise, few fruits and vegetables, smoking) as well as access to health care professionals and health insurance.

Your previously viewed stories are saved under “History.” If you’d like to share a story or use it in a presentation, click on “Snapshot” and it will be saved to your Photos folder.

Watch the Stats of the Union video and see how it works!

Here at Fathom we hit the ground running in 2011. We wrapped up a touch screen installation for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in January, helping our friends at GE shine the spotlight on all of their Ecomagination initiatives. The GE booth — a small city block is the more apt description — was an eco playground of residential wind turbines, electric cars, Wattstations, and energy efficient appliances.

In Powering the Kitchen, GE used its home energy monitors to track five major sources of kitchen energy use — refrigerator, range, dishwasher, overhead lights, and plugs — in a typical American household for one month. We built a tool that let visitors dig deeply into this information, and learn how the things we use every day impact our total energy use.

Here’s the piece in action at the trade show!

Patterns in our energy use arise at varying scales. First there is a single day, where you can see that energy spikes during daylight hours, but remains at a steady base level even in the middle of the night when nothing is on. The fridge, for example (red), is constantly cycling on and off to maintain a consistent cooling temperature.

Zoom out to an entire month, and see the same fridge energy use played out over a longer time period. Its easy to see how the fridge accounts for the largest chunk of energy used, followed by overhead lights (green) and plugs (blue).

Next zoom in on the appliances themselves. It was a revelation — for us at least — that the level of energy consumption for each appliance is not regular over time, but has peaks and valleys depending on a host of other factors.

There’s a lot to learn, too, from looking at just a single appliance. In this particular home, the dishwasher (purple) gets used about once per day, but it actually has differing energy needs depending on the settings used. In terms of cost, it represents a fraction of the overall energy use of the kitchen.

There’s also a version of Powering the Kitchen that has been adapted for the web.

In the fall of 2010, GE partnered with the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health to conduct a sweeping survey of health perceptions within the Saudi population, as well as trends in eating, beverage consumption, and fitness habits among Saudi consumers. We developed an online tool that not only presented the results of this study, but continues collecting survey responses from visitors to the GE Middle East Healthymagination site.

Take a look at the Saudi Health Survey over on the GE Visualization site.

We were particularly excited to work on this project, not only because we have developed a bit of a crush on health data, but because it was our first opportunity to do a piece in both Arabic and English. Part of the Saudi Health Survey included data on influential health products in the Middle East, so some of our initial research focused on brand imagery, which we used to inform our color and typography choices throughout the project.

As we progressed, a fascinating challenge emerged: not only did we have to design for characters that read right-to-left, but our entire concept of visual hierarchy had to be flipped along with it. Our realizations ranged from the obvious (page designs anchored to the upper right!) to the not-so-obvious (qualitative options in order from poor/fair/good become good/fair/poor). View this in action by clicking on the green button in the upper right (English), or the upper left (Arabic) to toggle both the language and the orientation of the interface.

More than in previous projects, we also relied on iconography that was general enough to translate across two languages.

It should also be noted that this project would not have been possible without our counterpart team of designers, translators, and developers in Saudi Arabia who were invaluable resources in making sure our visualizations translated to other cultures and other languages.

GE has just launched two visualization sites. We worked on the design for the first, which is an easy to access resource of the work they’ve been doing over the past year across healthymagination and ecomagination and can be found here: ge.com/visualization

You’ll find a lot of our work there — as well as work by Pentagram, David McCandless, Good and others.

If this gets you inspired, the other site was launched in conjunction with Seed and offers open challenges for those interested: visualizing.org.

Our latest project for GE is about the striking shifts in age for eight developed nations. A large portion of Japan’s population is between 60-64, and as that group grows older, it will have a significant impact on healthcare and the country’s economy. A similar spike is seen amongst ages 35-39, which will have a similar effect a generation later.

In addition to showing comparisons between pairs of countries, we also wanted a means to show the entire set of countries, to see how the ups and downs coincided with one another. The vertical scale is not population count, because overall population totals vary widely between the countries—instead we’re looking at the portion of people within each age range. We found this interesting because the spikes actually coincide less than you might expect from only looking at individual countries on the left.

More of our GE visualization work (along with projects from GOOD, Pentagram, and others) can be found at healthymagination.com.