4 ms·

I'm not sure this is great visualization. Firstly, trace ingredients are often what's important to the consumer. Fine, I know my peanut butter is mostly peanut

by hugh3 15y ago

I'm not sure this is great visualization. Firstly, trace ingredients are often what's important to the consumer. Fine, I know my peanut butter is mostly peanuts, but how much salt is there? Secondly, these are simple examples. What do you do with, say, a can of chicken and vegetable and noodle soup, which could easily have thirty ingredients before you even start counting the potentially-nasty additives down in a tiny box in the corner. Thirdly, apparently labellers aren't obliged to split up certain categories (eg broccoli, sugar snap peas, green beans and carrots are all in a single green square). So presumably this doesn't even solve the specified problem of not knowing how much white vs whole wheat is in your food -- why would you split up white and whole wheat into separate categories when beans and carrots are the same?

baconner 15y ago
I didn't think the #1 entry was very practical either, but the full list of entries is worth a look. There are some good ideas and more realistically usable designs in there. GOOD just isnt likely imo to choose winners based on usefulness over beauty.
calebmpeterson 15y ago
> Secondly, these are simple examples. What do you do with, say, a can of chicken and vegetable and noodle soup, which could easily have thirty ingredients before you even start counting the potentially-nasty additives down in a tiny box in the corner. How about inverting the tree-map such that the smaller the amount, the greater the portion of the tree-map taken up? You're going to need all of that space anyway for the names of those potentially-nasty additives to be printed in a legible font size...
- hugh3 15y ago
  Ah, the homeopathic approach to food labelling. I'm gonna sprinkle a grain of gold dust on every twinkie I sell, just to screw with the label.
backprojection 15y ago
> Firstly, trace ingredients are often what's important to the consumer. Fine, I know my peanut butter is mostly peanuts, but how much salt is there? You could put it on a log scale. Probably still confusing to people not familiar with logarithms.

by hugh3 15y ago

baconner 15y ago

I didn't think the #1 entry was very practical either, but the full list of entries is worth a look. There are some good ideas and more realistically usable designs in there. GOOD just isnt likely imo to choose winners based on usefulness over beauty.

calebmpeterson 15y ago

> Secondly, these are simple examples. What do you do with, say, a can of chicken and vegetable and noodle soup, which could easily have thirty ingredients before you even start counting the potentially-nasty additives down in a tiny box in the corner. How about inverting the tree-map such that the smaller the amount, the greater the portion of the tree-map taken up? You're going to need all of that space anyway for the names of those potentially-nasty additives to be printed in a legible font size...

hugh3 15y ago
Ah, the homeopathic approach to food labelling. I'm gonna sprinkle a grain of gold dust on every twinkie I sell, just to screw with the label.

backprojection 15y ago

> Firstly, trace ingredients are often what's important to the consumer. Fine, I know my peanut butter is mostly peanuts, but how much salt is there? You could put it on a log scale. Probably still confusing to people not familiar with logarithms.