Today is a great day for Atlanta Falcons fans. All-Pro tight end Tony Gonzalez announced he is coming back to play for one more year! To celebrate, lets take a look at some stats from Tony’s career and see why he is often praised as the greatest tight end of all time. Here is a preview image so you can look at something while the full thing loads… its kind of big. For the full infographic keep scrolling…   And here is the full infographic, which hopefully has loaded by now. To see it glorious full size, click the image below and then magnify it on the next screen. Enjoy!   I originally started this project as a way to dig into Tony’s stats to show that he should return for at least one more year. When I realized that his decision was largely based on personal matters – not

Tonight I finished the infographic I’ve been working on for the past seven weeks. Two versions of it actually, one for if Tony G. retires and one for if he comes back to play another year. They are fairly similar, but with subtle differences in the presentation in order to change the emphasis of the message. I suppose at some point I can put them up side by side to see if those subtleties are achieved. I’m actually a bit torn right now because I like the version for the retirement scenario better, but I’d rather get to see Tony play for another year. Like any project, once I finished the first 90%, I could start on the second 90%. There was a good bit of polishing to do but I’ve actually tried to do some of it as I went, mainly when I was stumped on something else. The

Done! Pretty much anyways. All of the major data for the infographic is now in place – I’m sure I’ll make a few final tweaks, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with it. Tonight I spent most of my time wrestling with a few ideas of how to present comparisons between Tony G. and the current crop of Tight Ends in the league. I started with the idea of normalizing per season, but realized that most athletes, Tony included, experience their top performance in the early half of their career.Also, many athletes, Tony excludes, get injured as they get older and start missing games or have to stop playing all together. I had a thought that I would project out the averages of each player into the future to predict when would be the soonest they could catch any of Tony’s current records. As I started working on

Night 5 of the Tony Gonzalez infographic. Tonight I mainly spent time making  tweaks to sections of the image I had already worked on. Some of it was nitpicking pixels, but a good bit was adding new information to charts that I already thought were packed. I’m really happy with the additional information I was able to get into a few of them tonight. I’d like to take a moment to talk about my thoughts on design iteration. As I design a data visualization I constantly ask myself five questions: What story am I trying to tell right here? Can I add any additional insight? What can I remove without sacrificing the story? Is the image easy to understand on its own? How can I make this awesome? Repeating this process tends to refine the image with each iteration. As elements are added the visualization becomes easier to understand but

19 hours down – the infographic now measures 16″ wide by 85″ tall – meaning it is officially taller than Tony Gonzalez. I wrapped the section comparing Tony’s career to 9 other of the greatest tight ends ever to play in the NFL. Here is a sneak preview, see if you can guess who each of them is just from the caricature. At this point I feel there are two things left to do: Compare Tony’s early years to the best tight ends of 2012 – to show how long the likes of Gronkowski and Graham have to go before catching the records of #88. Dig through the rest of the stats I have on Tony’s career looking for random trivia. We could be looking at a completed project in 2-3 more weeks which puts us right around the Free Agency start date. I’m not sure anything significant will happen

Tonight I spent 4 hours trying to represent some of football’s famous tight ends as vector images. How did I do? Random Trvia: I went to High School with Kellen Winslow Jr. and had a chance to meet his dad one day while I was setting up hurdles for a track workout. They were on the field doing a photo shoot for Sports Illustrated and the photographer needed an extra hand with something. I got to hang out for a bit and they took a few photos of me with the HOFer. I’m now 15 hours into this project and experiencing a bit of scope creep – the project keeps getting bigger as I get more done. I have however decided that I’m going to wait to release the final project until Tony either a) has an official retirement ceremony b) announces he will play for one more year. The marketer

Another night of work completed (11 hours so far) on what will surely be the best infographic about an NFL player I have ever made. Tonight I spend a lot of time looking at stats about other NFL Tight Ends. I wanted to find the best way to show how much of a stand out career Tony has had compared to many of the legendary Tight Ends; Ditka, Winslow, Sharpe & Newsome among others. I also wanted to compare him to today’s best Tight Ends (Graham, Gronkowski, Finley, etc.) to show just how much work they would have ahead of them if they wanted to catch his records. Hint: They have a long way to go. The Tight End position is an interesting one because of the dual blocking & receiving responsibilities – I’m learning a lot about the history and evolution of the role as I dig through the

My idea for this week’s session was to look at some stats about Tony Gonzalez. I originally thought I would be coming up with something like a ‘5 reasons why Tony Gonzalez shouldn’t retire’ post – but after thinking about it I realized that data wasn’t the issue here. Tony doesn’t need convincing that he still has it, or that the Falcons are so close – his decision, whatever it will be, is driven by personal reasons. I respect that and don’t want data to add needless pressure. So, already knee deep in data about the career of Tony Gonzalez, I decided to honor his career by creating an infographic. I am about 7 hours in and it is looking sweet – I will likely have to finish it this weekend though – so look for the final product next week. In the mean time, here is a sneak preview…