Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW

Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad is a new infographic from Rocksauce Studios just in time for SxSW 2012 this weekend.

Since 1987, SXSW has morphed into an interactive, film and music conference and festival that brought together 19,364 attendees in 2011.

Austin-based app development firm, Rocksauce Studios, has created an infographic that dissects the interactive portion of SXSW, and proves why this conference is the new popular techie playground.  

The topics and cited statistics covered in “The Evolution of SXSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad” include:

- History of SXSW

- 2011 Attendance Demographics

- Top 10 Types of Business of Interactive Registrants  

- Geographic Breakdown of Total Interactive Registrants

- Successful SXSW Startup Launches

- Recent SXSW Web Awards  / Interactive Awards Winners

- Reasons So Many Companies Chose to Launch at SXSW

- The Accelerator

You can read more about the development of the infographic on Silicon Angle

This design does a really good job with the visual basics.  Showing the icons/logos of the startup companies, illustrating the business types, mapping the conference registrants. The overall design tells a good story top-to-bottom to the readers, and it’s easy to follow the flow of information.

Three things stood out to me that could be improved:

• There are a lot of data values in the text of the timeline that should have been visualized.

• The three shapes showing the amount of Interactive Conference Participants, Conference Sessions and Interactive Media in Attendance all of different values, but the shapes are not sized to match those values.

• The last section “The Accelerator” seems to fall apart as all text, even though there are some good data values there that should have been visualized.

Thanks to Kelly for sending in the link!