The Secret Language of Flowers: Interactive Data Visualisation
The art of flower giving is among the most ancient ways of showing gratitude and appreciation to loved ones. Not only flowers are a nice addition to your living room, but it’s been studied they can positively affect people’s mood and their perception of others! Each flower has a different meaning according to its shape, colour and history, other than the way it is arranged in a bouquet. The aim of this infographic is classifying 88 varieties of flowers according to their colour and what they mean when gifted to someone. For the purpose of this visualisation, the emotions, values or concepts each flower conveys have been classified into 12 general areas of meaning based
on Carl Gustav Jung’s personality archetypes.
The aim of this visualisation was answering the following questions:
1.What is the meaning for each of the 88 flowers considered?
2. Is there a correlation between the colour of a flower and its meaning? (i.e. What value or emotion are pink flowers usually associated with?)
3.What is the most common meaning attributed to flowers?
The visualisation comprises of two parts, allowing two levels of analysis. The first part explores the meaning of flowers according to colour; the second part categorises flowers according to meaning. On the left, I providing a legend and “how to read it” section; I also included labels and short captions to help viewers read the visualisation correctly.
I wanted my visualisation to reach the wider possible audience; as a consequence, I avoided technical jargon from the world of botany and relied on a simple narrative.
Legend
Design process
After various iterations on paper, I used SankeyMatic to create a draft of the sankey diagram, then exported it for editing on Sketch. The flower diagrams were created directly with the latter.
