Death and Taxes

Roles involved: Poster automation and design; Interactive concept, design and web implementation

Project link: http://graphicacy.com/viz/budget/

December 2013

Death and Taxes is a poster concept initiated by Jess Bachman in early 2006. It depicts where the federal money goes by visualizing the President's budget request each year. For years he created the poster in Illustrator by hand. Graphicacy bought the franchise in early 2013 and automated most of the data scrapping, cleaning and sketching process. I wrote an automation script, slightely tweaked the poster design and produced the posters of 2013 and 2014 (2014 and 2015 FY Budget).

Death and Taxes poster sketch

Inspired by the BubbleTree javascript library, which mimicked the look of the poster perfectly, I worked with the team at Graphicacy and built up an interactive. It went through several concept iterations before arriving at the final shape.

Exclusive interactive features allow users to compare the current budget with the budget last year and that of ten years ago:

Death and Taxes interactive sketch