One of the reasons I'm going on this insane journey is because it will allow me to solve some interesting design problems. I'm going to think of my work here as filling a 30-page magazine; the site will only be actively updated for thirty days, but I want it to stand on its own as a completed work when we're finished. But before we can start building the content, we have to address the problem of visualizing the complicated itineraries. My first task was to develop some simple data visualizations that we can build upon as we go.
For the site's structure, I settled on a day-centric navigation. Most blogs focus almost entirely on guiding readers down a reverse-linear timeline of posts, but that type of structure causes old content to get lost quickly. In a magazine, each spread stands on its own; the only navigational elements are the page numbers and the physical separation of the pages in the binding. With the 30 circles representing days at the top here, I hope there's a clear path for viewing separated content in a similar way.
Alaska has been building a complicated series of itineraries to cram all 42 cities into the time we have; some days we have five or more flights packed into a period of several hours. I haven't had time yet to perfect a visualization for each day that I'm happy with, but the one above [All times eastern] seems to work reasonably well (at least for the first few days). I'll post something similar to this infographic every day and continually attempt to improve it.
Flights are great for doing realtime information visualization because they're linear, planned, and predictable. If you click on a flight that is currently in progress (when that feature is finished), you’ll be able to see a live-updating graphic like the one below [Realtimeness].
I have a slight obsession with progress bars and numbers, so you’ll definitely see a lot of them here in the coming weeks.