In celebration of its 175th anniversary, Scientific American wanted to explore visualizing the color trends of its 5,148 covers since the beginning. Beginning in 1845, issues were published weekly in black and white, started including color around 1916 and switched to full color in 1921 when they also switched to monthly issues.
The visualization is separated into two parts: weekly and monthly issues. A representative cover for each year of the weekly issues was chosen and each square displays the average color. The top five colors used in each monthly cover were extracted and arranged in bars organized by year and month. Hovering over any part of the visual shows the cover for that year or month.
Press
- Color breakdown of Scientific American covers , Dec 20, 2019, FlowingData
- Best of the visualisation web... December 2019, Feb 14, 2020, Visualising Data
Published December 17, 2019
