Create an informative visual based on a data set that is concise, simple and can be easily understood.

the process

Growing up, I was always drawn to whales and had even studied them during my graduate studies. I had some knowledge about whaling history but wanted to bring into light the affects it had on different whale populations over a period of time.

When I started researching on the topic more, some populations didn't have records for each year, so I am only showing populations that had yearly records. I used datasets from NOAA fisheries. 

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I quickly plotted out the data to get a general idea of what it would look like. I immediately noticed the scales were somewhat different especially with the minke whale. This posed a great design challenge for me. Keeping this in mind, I sketched out a few ideas, one was more illustrative, another was less illustrative and then came up with the current design that was a combo of both. 

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