Hi, my name is Eden and I am addicted to shoes.
I have a large shoe collection. 230+ pairs at my last count. Much larger than any reasonable person should have, especially if that person works from home in slippers all day every day.
Shoes are my favorite accessory! In my defense, roughly 85% of my collection was purchased from a thrift, secondhand, or resale store for a low price. My most expensive pair is a pair of Frye boots I bought new for a few hundred dollars; my least expensive pair was FREE from the local Buy Nothing group! My philosophy is to buy quality shoes, take good care of them, get them repaired by a cobbler, and they will last a lifetime. I look for classics that will never go out of style and are made of quality materials worthy of repairing, which make the pair a buy-it-once item that will get better with time! I've had several pairs since high school! I also have a hard time decluttering my collection because I love each pair so much... So my collection has ballooned over the years.
Having so many shoes takes up a lot of space and my physical shoe database lives in my basement. I have a wall of shoes arranged on shelves into carefully-chosen rows and columns based on style, brand, and frequency of wear. (I'd show a photo, but my unfinished basement gives "Silence of the Lambs" vibes...) I've been building an online database of my collection, too: to prevent buying styles too similar to what I already have, identify pairs I never wear to rehome, and just as a fun way to track my hobby.
So when I saw the call for the Dear Nightingale "Paper and no pencil? An analogue data creation challenge!" my mind went immediately to footprints. The challenge is simple: use an A4 sized piece of copy paper and any method or medium EXCEPT drawing to create a data visualization. The only thing you are allowed to write is the legend and annotations.
Illustration by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posaved
The hardest part of this challenge was not finding a data set, brainstorming an idea, or making the visualization...
The hardest part was categorizing my shoe collection into ONLY four neat categories! Take heels for example: stilettos, kitten heels, block heels, pumps, slingbacks... As a shoe lover, each pair in my collection resides in the middle of a complicated Venn Diagram of style, color, material, designer, and vibe. It was difficult to "pare" my categories down to what would fit on one small sheet of paper. (See what I did there?)
After testing my visualization concept on a piece of blank paper, it became clear that I only had room for four footprints when positioning the paper the long way. I experimented with overlapping the footprints significantly, and while that made for cool layered pattern artwork, it muddied the visual. So I was limited to just four footprints which meant only four categories of shoes. Making my categories, I kept "kiss - keep it simple, stupid" in my mind and decided to categorize my collection by overall vibe: casual, formal, athletic, and seasonal. I live in the Midwest, USA, so I have a fair amount of shoes like sandals and snow boots that I only wear for specific seasons that reside outside of my regular rotation.
With over 230 pairs, I sketched a rough scale and decided to graph 10's of each category.
The second hardest part of making this visualization was deciding which of my collection I was fine smearing paint on. (The horror!) Each pair precious, this was surprisingly hard. Nothing with leather, canvas, or decorative soles, and nothing too expensive... yet I wanted the footprint to match the category well. I found a Loeffler Randall espadrille for casual, a BCBG heel for formal, an Asics hiking shoe for athletic, and a Birkenstock sandal for seasonal.
A viz in progress!
With a rough scale off to the side, I applied a thin color of DVS-colored paint to my first sole. Making the footprint was surprisingly fun! Because I was overlapping prints, I let each dry completely before moving on to the next. Running to the bathroom to immediately rinse the paint off each sole was a critical step in the process. After all the prints were dry, I drew in my scale, categories, and title with a Sharpie marker.
Here is my final visual:
I am happy with how it turned out! The length of the footprints denotes the number of pairs, in tens, in each category, and the footprint itself adds a fun pattern to the viz. Looking at it, before reading the title, it is immediately clear that the viz has something to do with shoes. I also like how the use of 10's for the scale disguises my hoarding a little bit, haha. If I were to re-do it, I would pay better attention to the shape of each shoes' toe. The pointy, rounded, narrow, and wide shapes makes it difficult to read where each print truly ends on the scale. I would try to find shoes with a more similar toe shape to use for the prints.
This was a really fun challenge, and I think I met all of the specifications: 1 piece of printer paper, paint, and only writing in scales, axes, and titles. As I mentioned earlier, I am building a complete list of all of my pairs, and collecting data about their broad and specific styles, materials, embellishments, designers, comfort level, and number of wears. Once I have that dataset complete, that will be a fantastic dataset that I will use to practice and build my data visualization skills and improve upon this simple (yet fun!) variation of the bar graph.
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