I’m obsessed with representing scale. Too often are we unable to process scale — COVID is a classic example, we either freak out on the scale of a few people, or a few hundred thousand. Seems everything is flat.

I’ve made it a project to try represent the scale of a topic thats interesting to me — Japanese ski resorts. Initially I started to represent how high and big each ski resort is in this data viz:

The height is the vertical drop, and the width is proportional to the known area. However, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Each resort is a different shape — sometimes with huge areas in the middle which you can’t use — effectively lying about their area. Sometimes, the tallest part of the mountain is closed for financial or staffing reasons.

The most recent attempt of mine is for me to build a way to trace the shape of the mountain, and then represent this graphically. Here are the shape of 200 ski areas. And finally I’m starting to get a visual on the relative sizes of each mountain.

The output is so nice that I’m considering making this in to a poster to hang on my wall.