For the Bern Open Data Camp on April 27, 2012 we were generously sponsored by Netcetera (thanks!) to print a custom t-shirt for every participant. We had to come up with a design quickly based on brand new Opendata.ch logos designed by Thierry Blancpain. What better way to express the theme of our event than with Open Data?

Desiring to make a design that suggests a “splashing out” of data, we took the national statistics of cantonal populations, distributed them based on the geographical location of each canton, and plotted a circle with a representative area. Of course the possibilities are endless for more complicated visualizations, and we hope that more creative designs will be used on future Open Data wear.

High quality digital printing on the Fairtrade shirts was done by Bern-based custom wear shop Blessed.

Here are the sources:

• Google Fusion table
• Processed CSV data
• R script for generating bubble graph
• SVG export of graph from R
• Inkscape designs

The t-shirt template is a Creative Commons SVG illustration by Fedora Design Team member Nicu Buculei.

• Ständige Wohnbevölkerung nach Kanton, 2011 - Bundesamt für Statistik
• Google Geocoding API

• Oleg Lavrovsky
• Thierry Blancpain

• r-project.org, open source statistics package
• Inkscape, an open source vector editor
• Google Fusion Tables, online data aggregation
• Visual.ly blog for design standards