Superdot is an interdisciplinary information design agency in Basel. Over the last few years, the company has positioned itself in the Swiss region as a specialist at the intersection of data, design, business and art.

Superdot has developed a unique approach to tackling problems of complexity through an iterative process employing visual tools and workshops with the close participation of clients and other stakeholders. Providing an open-minded, unbiased third-party perspective, Superdot aims to disentangle all factors influencing a project and creates a logical outline, concept and approach for its realisation.

With this project Superdot set itself the challenge of raising visual awareness concerning the global societal problem of wage inequality. For this purpose, they have analyzed a data sets of 82 world metropolises with regard to the income differences of different job groups. First, they visualized their results in a poster series with new chart types and a systematic visual grammar before transforming the data and the visual principle into an interactive data story called «Out of Balance».

The application leads step by step through the different dimensions of the complex economic data, draws attention to the most striking differences and makes the data playfully tangible.

Out of Balance sheds light on global societal problems and demonstrates the potential of data visualization.