German Music Information Centre

Posters with Data That Sings

The German Music Information Centre (miz), run by the German Music Council, collects data on musical life in Germany. How many people make music in their free time, where young talents find funding opportunities, or how high the music industry’s revenues are – miz knows. Using miz’s data, we create large-format, visually striking infographicsthat serve as posters on the back of the magazines. Fact-based design made to hang on the wall. Topics in the poster and magazine series include the most popular operas, gender distribution in orchestras, the habits of amateur musicians, and the distance to the nearest music school.

Task

Develop visually ambitious infographics on music data, create small supporting graphics for the magazine section, print the magazine poster

Solution

A main infographic as a poster on one page, plus data visualizations for the text in the magazine section

Services

Infographics and info text, data visualizations, print preparation and production

Finding the Highlights

The data is compiled in extensive tables. We go through the information piece by piece and check it for key statements and unusual highlights. How does the data behave across different infographics? Which form best captures the key statement? Through sketches, associations, and shapes, we develop the rough concept for the infographic on the main poster.

The Poster Series: Informative and Decorative

Detailed, meaningful, and visually strong: each poster presents the development of music, musicians, and institutions. For the target audience within music institutions, the poster series is both informative and decorative – a current picture of the music landscape in Germany. For the magazine page, we develop supporting graphics that visualize the data in the text in a structured way. This lets readers dive deeper into the topics and learn facts that are hard to convey in text alone. Each poster brings together more than 100 data points in more than 20 visualizations and has already been distributed in more than 5,000 copies.

Impact

The collaboration turned into an ongoing poster series: topics such as opera attendance, the gender balance in orchestras or the distance to the nearest music school each became an edition of their own. Every poster brings together more than 100 data points in over 20 visualizations, and more than 5,000 copies have been distributed.

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Whether strategy, campaign, or digital product – if you want to communicate complex topics clearly, we look forward to the conversation.

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