© 2012 smitten Magnifying the Universe

Magnifying the Universe

For the past couple months I’ve been working freelancing on a number of different projects through my personal LLC, Mandril Design.

Recently, one of the most gorgeous endeavors and massive undertakings I’ve ever worked on was for Number Sleuth. Through Killer Infographics, my cousin’s amazing infographic shop here in Seattle and with Science is Beautiful, we created a pair of infographics to help illustrate just how big the universe is. One is a static infographic which is a staggering 1000px wide by 20,000px tall showing the relative scale of over a hundred objects within the observable universe (infographic here).

The graphics used in the static version were individually rendered out into high res versions and paired up with an XML file which dictates their scale as well as 10xE position and some descriptive text. Some fancy math and a bunch of tweening with the help of my favorite tweening engine, TweenLite’s AS3 classes, and you have an opportunity to zoom all the way from the observable universe down to a hydrogen atom’s nucleus. All in all, that’s a zoom of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x … not something I think they carry at REI or your neighborhood science gadget store.

You’re going to want to blow this up full screen by the way. It’s infinitely better than in the tiny box below. :-D


The Universe made possible by Number Sleuth

Today I did a quick search in Google and found that the infographic was spreading like wildfire. Guy Kawasaki tweeted about it, somehow it made it’s way to Alltop and Digg and I think most inspiring thus far, it was in National Geographic’s blog. As a long time science lover, it’s truly an honor to have my work anywhere on the pages of National Geographic … and apropos that it’s on their site given my love of the web.

Between these sites and a few others, it’s already garnered over a thousand likes, has been tweeted a few hundred times and pinned to a number of boards on Pinterest. I can’t wait to see how viral it goes over the next few weeks. Definitely look forward to the next endeavor with Number Sleuth, Killer Infographics and Science is Beautiful. There’s a whole universe of gorgeous out there that needs to be shared. Definitely an honor to illustrate it in this way for people to get a good understanding of really just how tiny we are in relationship to so many other things.

Please let me know what you think and definitely share with your friends and family so that they can be inspired as well. I can only imagine if I would have seen something like this when I was a kid. Boom … mind blown.

One Comment

  1. Marty
    Posted April 22, 2012 at 5:52 pm | #

    I’m blown away! How does your brain work like this. You are a gift to this world beyond the ability for words to adequately describe.

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  1. [...] on this week as well. My sister’s fiancé was promoted at long last (congrats Charlie!), the Magnifying the Universe infographic from last week now has more Spanish users than those in the US, North by Nine is going [...]

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