I’ve beaten a lot of procrastination to get this blog post finally written, but today I wanted to share an exciting thing in my life – I’m featured in a book! Well, something I’ve designed is featured in a book. The book is Understanding the World, published by Taschen, and it’s a massive coffee table book of tons of infographics. They decided to include my So You Want to Watch YouTube flowchart, so keep reading to learn how that came about. And if you want to see any of the images larger, just click on them to see the full size version!
In case you’re not familiar with the flowchart, I designed it in the summer of 2010 after being inspired by the So You Need a Typeface poster. It quickly spread across the internet and got tons of attention on design blogs, and it was actually the stepping stone that got my foot in the door for my eventual job at YouTube as a UX designer. When I got the email from one of the designers at YouTube saying they liked it and wanted to print some copies to hang it in the office, I freaked out, and continued freaking out when that connection turned into a job interview and then a full time job after graduation.
I remember the day I was designing it in 2010. It was a simpler time back when everyone was still known just by their often strange usernames, rather than the more professional-looking Google+ branding of today. I was living in New York City for the summer for an internship, and I was in my room in the NYU dorms. I had come up with the idea for a YouTube channel flowchart a few days earlier while at my internship, and so I spent a night listing out all of the channels I wanted to include and working in Illustrator to make a rough tree of the questions and where they would divide. Then the next night I started designing it and fitting all of the questions tightly into a poster-sized canvas. I sent my progress to Alan Lastufka as I worked on it for his feedback, but it actually came together pretty easily, and all the questions I wrote ended up fitting exactly into the canvas size I had begun with. I put it online the next day and then it slowly gained momentum as more and more people shared it. My favorite feature though was on FastCo Design, which is a blog I still love to this day.
The flowchart is actually a great snapshot of who was active in the YouTube community in 2010. The YouTube landscape has changed so much since then, and I took the liberty of making an updated version for 2015, crossing out any channels that no longer upload content (blue), and any creators who have since turned out to be sexual abusers and banished from the community (green). The remaining channels are still active and well five years later, so if you need some new channels to watch, look some of them up! (Just note that I made a typo in Gunnarolla’s username five years ago. Sorry Andrew!)
So onto the book. I was first contacted by Taschen in late 2013 asking for permission to reprint the flowchart, and then I got the book in the mail a year later. When they contacted me, I had no idea what the scope of this massive book would be, so I was very surprised when I got such a huge book in the mail! I didn’t have a banana, but I put a colored pencil on the cover of the book for scale, so you can see how massive it is.
If you want to see the book in action, I showed it in this video that I posted in December. It’s seriously bigger than my face!
I love seeing traditional media attempting to explain the YouTube community. And bonus – if you’re fluent in French or German, the entire book is translated into both languages!
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing my name in print. Thank you so much to Taschen for wanting to feature my design!
The rest of the book is fantastic as well, and if you’re interested in information design, I definitely recommend picking up a copy. It retails for $70, but you can get it on Amazon for about $45 (my parents did that and had a great time showing it to our entire family over the holidays). I hope you guys liked this little trip into YouTube history, and stay tuned for more posts soon!
