Air and Steel

On Matt Korostoff

An engineer creating very good visual websites and other interesting stuff

Wealth shown to scale

My introduction to Matt's work was his wealth visualization (via mkorostoff.github.io).

It uses one pixel to represent $1000, and demonstrates other major milestones (median US household income, average lifetime wealth, etc. in comparison to Jeff Bezos' wealth). I think it's a great visualization and a well-made resource, so shoutout to Matt for his great work. I can't state enough how much I respect and admire projects like these.

Incarceration in real numbers

Which brings us to another great project, a visualization of the number of Americans jailed or imprisoned (via mkorostoff.github.io).

Faces of Covid-19

And a project related to Covid, Matt also created a visualization of the 535,000 Americans who died of Covid in the first year of the pandemic

In his words,

In the first year of the global pandemic, COVID-19 killed around 535,000 Americans, a number that defies comprehension. This website is intended to help visitors understand the massive scale of this event by putting a human face on each person lost. It is my hope that this will allow visitors to understand the death toll as more than just a number.

8 minutes 46 seconds

A project related to the death of George Floyd, Matt created a timer to fully realize the reality of the killing (via 8m46s.com).

On May 25th 2020, Derek Chauvin held his knee on the neck of George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, resulting in Mr. Floyd's death. I invite visitors to sit quietly and reflect for this same length of time. It feels like an eternity. A partial transcript of the incident is provided throughout.


Site

The rest of Matt's work (serious, unserious, and computer) can be found on his site: mattkorostoff.com/.

I also really enjoyed Factory Factory Factory, aka "Modern Software Development Summarized", originally titled "Why I Hate Frameworks" by Benji Smith and maintained on that domain by Matt.


index tags: Visualizations, Matt Korostoff, MKorostoff, Benji Smith, Wealth shown to scale, Jeff Bezos, Incarceration in real numbers, Incarceration, Faces of Covid-19, Eight minutes forty-six seconds, Factory Factory Factory


category tags: Modern Authors


Hi! Aaron, nice to meet ya. This site is where I'm documenting as I go, in order to keep my learnings and thoughts in an easily accessible digital notebook. My purpose in life is organizing (engineering, if you will) and building the change I want to see in the world; to help as much as possible, while I've got the chance to do it.