Plastic Ocean Infographics
Design process of my first data infographic that reached the top post on r/dataisbeautiful.
This is the story of how I made my first serious data infographic — one that ended up going viral on r/dataisbeautiful. The topic was mismanaged plastic waste. The process changed how I think about design.
The Starting Point
I’d been exploring ocean plastic datasets for a while — the kind of data that sits quietly in CSV files from research papers, full of numbers that should feel enormous but somehow don’t land. Eight million tonnes of plastic entering the ocean each year. The number means nothing until it’s visual.
My first sketches were bad. I went straight for a map — dots by country, sized by output. Classic. Forgettable. It looked like every other environmental data viz I’d ever seen.
The Pivot
The thing I kept coming back to was where the plastic came from. Not just which countries — but the rivers. A handful of rivers in Asia account for the majority of ocean plastic. That felt like the story. That felt unfair and specific in a way that makes you feel something.
I rebuilt the concept around a river-to-ocean flow. Each river shown as a stream emptying into a body of water, scaled by contribution. Suddenly it wasn’t abstract statistics — it was geography made accusatory.
The Build Process
I did the data work in Observable and D3. Mostly scrubbing, normalizing, checking against multiple sources — the Ocean Conservancy report and Jambeck et al. (2015) were the primary references.
Once the data structure was clean, I moved into Illustrator. This is where the real design decisions happened:
- Color: I wanted ocean blues but with the plastic feeling wrong — I used a warm, slightly toxic teal against deep navy. Nothing felt natural on purpose.
- Typography: Dense but readable. I wanted it to feel like a research output that someone made beautiful, not a corporate infographic.
- Labels: Every number has a unit and a source. If I couldn’t cite it, it didn’t go in.
The whole piece took about three weeks of evenings.
The Reddit Moment
I posted it on a Thursday evening. By Friday morning it had climbed to the top of r/dataisbeautiful — #1 post for the day, then the week. The comments were mostly constructive; a few people questioned methodology (fair), most were just sharing it.
It was the first time I understood that a visualization can do something a paper can’t. The same data, given shape and color and hierarchy, reaches people who would never read the study.
What I Took From It
The tool doesn’t matter. I’ve seen beautiful work done in Excel and broken work done in D3. What matters is the story decision you make before you open any software — and whether every design choice after that serves that decision or fights it.
For plastic oceans, the decision was: make the source feel specific, not systemic. Everything else followed from that.