We picked up an upright 1905 Steinway model “K” for fifty dollars at an estate sale a few weeks ago. Steinway has been the world’s premiere piano-maker for over a century, so even though ours is in rough shape, it’s pretty cool just to have one sitting in the living room.

Here’s a look at the costs of the classic Steinway model “D” grand piano since 1900. Values reflect the lowest retail price for each year and no, they are not adjusted for inflation! (It’s about what pianos actually cost at the time)

Using varied sizes of a two-dimensional shape is often an effective way to visually compare quantities. One might think that scaling an object 200% in Illustrator would cause its area to become twice as large. This is not the case. It will actually result in an area four times as large, due to the fact that both the linear height and linear width are scaled by 200%.

Here is a simple formula to calculate the necessary scale percentage, based on the relationship of two values.

Example: We need one square to represent 100 people and another to represent 200 people.

Now just take a copy of the first square and scale it 141.4% in Illustrator.

Population density measures the amount of people in a given area, generally per square kilometer or mile. It’s difficult to get a clear image of what these vast spaces actually represent, so I thought that it would be interesting to flip the equation on its head and figure out how much space there is on average per person. This “Personal Space” is very easy to calculate. In the imperial system, ft² per person = 27,878,000/(people per mile²). In the metric system, m² per person = 1,000,000/(people per km²).

One very simple bit of data stood out in the research for the last set of visualizations: The Celtics and the Lakers have won more NBA Championships than all other franchises combined. Pretty amazing.

It clearly takes a village. Jordan was already a force to be reckoned with in the late eighties, but it wasn’t until Pippen, Grant and Kukoc stepped onto the court that the championships started rolling in. This phenomenon was obviously not missed on LeBron in “The Decision” to join forces with Wade and Bosh.

With seventeen total Championships, the Celts are the most decorated franchise of all time. However, none of the big stars ever averaged over thirty points a season (Bird got pretty close at 29.9 in the 1987-88 season), again exemplifying the power of a rounded team effort.

It’s also interesting to see how the unparalleled run of wins in the sixties tapers out into the double decade drought that began in the mid-eighties.

Many of the biggest names in the history of the sport were dressed in gold. With sixteen wins, the Lakers fall just one shy of Boston, and once again the championships coincide more closely with the clusters than the peaks.

Some of the team’s best played in the 60′s, but due to Celtic domination, Baylor, West and Chamberlain didn’t take the finals until quite late in their careers.

The thought of the Knicks bringing home the gold seems somewhat far fetched, but apparently it actually happened in ’70 and ’73. The days of Clydesanity must have been pretty exciting.

We were cleaning out some drawers in the office yesterday and came across a clunky old SyQuest disk. Memories of a particular workflow suddenly came back to me:

- Flip through a book of stock images. Choose one.
- Walk to the stock agency and pick up the chrome.
- Drop the chrome off at a service bureau for a drum scan.
- Return to the office and wait.
- Receive package from courier several hours later.
- Take out chrome and SyQuest disk with “hi-res” image.
- Try repetitively to mount the disk until it finally works.

This last step was particularly fun, as it often required several OS reboots.

All of this is of course now accomplished with a scroll and a click (and in turn a few extra inches around the waistline), but SyQuest certainly deserves a tip of the hat for making large graphic files portable and quietly revolutionizing the design field.

This graphic focuses on some of the more popular magnetic removable storage formats from the 70′s through the mid 90′s, before optical and ultimately solid state technologies came on with a vengeance.

A quick note: Each of these formats were revamped several times to increase storage capacity over the years. I’ve just included the sizes that were most popular for long periods of time as a frame of reference.