Coasters about the Colombian coffee trade
As a Colombian, I grew up drinking coffee - whether with warm milk in my sippy cup as a child or to keep me awake during long nights in college. Growing up in America, Colombian coffee was always a point of pride that reconnected me to my family’s heritage. While I drink coffee from around the world, I also grew up knowing that Colombian coffee is some of the best (definitely not biased).
For this project, I wanted to explore more of the data behind the Colombian coffee trade, and also understand more about what makes Colombian coffee unique and such a popular choice worldwide. While this only started to scratch the surface, I definitely learned a ton and got a chance to learn a little bit more about one of the major exports for Colombia.
Audience
Coffee drinkers at a (hypothetical) coffee shop that sells Colombian coffee. These coasters could be scattered around the store, and also available for purchase as a set.
Medium
While brainstorming ideas, my partner pointed to a set of tourist-y hand-carved leather coasters that I received as a gift from my mom. He suggested doing “something about coffee but on coasters” and I loved that idea. I imagined these coasters as a set of 4 coasters printed on thick square coasters with rounded corners.
Design considerations
To appeal to an audience of coffee drinkers, I wanted each coaster to have an eye-catching chart and a fun-fact that were thematically linked. These should give enough information at a glance that a distracted coffee drinker could learn something new, and yet provide enough richness of information that the occasional curious coffee-lover could spend a couple of minutes diving into the full set of charts.
Colombian coffee exports globally
When I first imagined using a collage effect for these charts, I was curious to explore using an area chart or stream graph. When I found this data on exports by country year-over-year it plotted perfectly into this style.
Colombian coffee products and flavor
Unsurprisingly the main exports of Colombian coffee are whole or ground beans. Because this chart was about the types of coffee that are exported, I paired it with a fact about how Colombian coffee tastes — to tie together the idea of what is being exported with why that coffee is enjoyed by others globally.
Colombian coffee farms and hand-picking
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Colombian coffee is primarily grown on small farms of <5 hectares, many of which are run by families. I was curious about the people behind these numbers, so I paired this chart with a humanizing image of what it actually means to pick coffee on these small farms. I’ve heard anecdotes from my mom about how she’s seen coffee pickers wearing harnesses in order to pick coffee without sliding off the side of the mountain, and when I found this fact in an article it seemed spot-on.
Colombian coffee vs. other large producers of coffee
While digging into this data I deliberated between showing coffee exports by value or by volume. I chose to make the chart about exports by volume because this allowed me to add an extra level of information about the types of coffee exported and show how Colombia focuses on the Arabica strain of coffee.
However, I found it fascinating that Colombian coffee sells for so much more than coffee from other of the largest producers. Digging into this revealed that this number was exactly due to the fact highlighted in the previous coaster. Because coffee is grown on steep mountainsides the growing and picking process hasn’t been automated like it has in other places, the process is still highly manual and labor-intensive which leads to a premium on the sale of Colombian coffee products.
The collage-style design of this project was inspired by Gabrielle Merite. In her course on “Creative Data Visualization” on Domestika, she speaks about how when using more illustrative elements like photo collage in an image it’s often helpful to balance that visual complexity with simpler chart types. This project was an exercise in trying to put that into action, and I’m excited to continue trying to apply creative elements into data visualization that can help draw in and spark curiosity in an audience, while still informing them about new and interesting topics.
