Tracking the Beatles
Winner of Capstone Award - MICA MPS Data Analytics & Visualization, Spring 2022
‘Tracking the Beatles’ began with my viewing of Peter Jackson’s spellbinding Beatles documentary Get Back, which documents the rocky creation of Let It Be; I was captivated by how candid the films portrayed the group and their creative process. I found myself thinking “Wow, I wish I could see the making of the rest of their albums!”. Upon finding The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn, a complete history of every recording session the group took part in, I realized that I could use data visualization to pursue this goal.
DATA
Data was manually complied into Excel and analyzed in Tableau from the following sources:
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn (Dates, studios, tape tracks, original/covers, rhythm/overdub tracks, working hours)
Revolution in the Head, by Ian MacDonald (Dates, studios, songwriting credits, original/covers)
DESIGN
‘Tracking the Beatles’ is designed to be an exploratory infographic, inviting Beatles and music fans to explore the creation of their favorite songs and albums from a perspective not seen before. Throughout the making of the project, I constantly found interesting tidbits of trivia (my favorite being the boomeranging of their working hours from midday to late nights and back again), and I hope that others discover similar fun facts as they explore the work.
The infographics are designed to fold and fit inside of a vinyl record, so the reader can explore the creation of the music while listening to their favorite Beatles albums (big shoutout to Jess Standfer for sparking this idea!).
The typeface (Collier) aims to evoke the ‘60s era styling of their albums, while the layout is inspired by studio logs from the period as well as Giorgia Lupi’s static infographic work for La Lettura.
