In 2021, We created a project for the 2021 Olympic games, with the aim of showcasing the Hungarian Olympic successes. The other aim was to make a comprehensive project about a sport event that intrigues millions of people all over the world. The continuation of this was the historical analysis of Formula One, another popular sport event. (Later the year, the third and final part was also made, about the FIFA World Cup.)
The project was based on open data found on Kaggle. The basic charts were created using this data, in Flourish. However, the majority of the time required was spent on creating the vectorised versions of all race tacks ever used for a Formula One race. The majority of these were started from data gathered using OpenStreetMap’s Overpass Turbo. Best case scenario, OSM contained the actual track. When the track was not available in this way, because the race was on a street circuit, a separate line object had to be created using segments of the streets. There were also cases, when the streets were built over or were not yet built (for example, the Las Vegas race track). Those occasions, an overlay of the track was georeferenced in QGIS, and manually drawn over with a line tool.
The use of QGIS was necessary for many reasons. OSM was a great start for the actual line of the tracks, which minimised the necessary manual tracing. The tracks in the end could maintain their aspect ratio in relation to each other, because these shapes were created on a map. Finally, the 2022 tracks were also used in an animation, where not only the racetrack, but its surroundings (buildings, roads, water, etc) were included. So an additional geospatial work was needed, which made using QGIS essential.
The site was created to resemble a racetrack, with animated Formula One race cars driving along the track. This was created using Figma and coded using Javascript.
Softwares and JS libraries used include: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Aspose GeoJSON to SVG, Figma, Flourish.studio, GSAP, Just Animate JS, Polymorph, R Studio, QGIS.
The project was mentioned in a weekly best-of by GIJN.
Click here to access the full project.
Published on 31st July 2022.
Szabó Krisztián 