The COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard for Germany by Studio NAND, Truth & Beauty / Moritz Stefaner

Studio NAND and Truth & Beauty (Moritz Stefaner) were commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with Cosmonauts & Kings to build the single source of truth on the progress of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Germany. The data is provided by the Ministry itself as well as the Robert-Koch Institute, Germany’s public health institute.

We designed a mobile-first solution for the official vaccination dashboard that emphasizes clear communication of governmental data based on the following primary principles:

1. Use text as an effective and clear medium (fig. 1):

Dynamically generated text plays a key role in the project: its low barrier, screenreader-friendly, and easily shareable nature makes it a perfect complement to statistical graphs.

2. Provide an alternative to the very scientifically focused way of communication around the pandemic. (fig. 2)

We have introduced selected playful elements like an animated iconographic clock showing vaccinations per second based on the number of vaccinations per day.

3. Design for shareability from the ground up. (fig. 3)

We designed the website from the ground up for shareability. A link to the dashboard in messengers and social media will always show a preview with the latest data, generated automatically when the data is updated.

4. Emphasize the long term perspective of the campaign while focusing on success as it happens. (fig. 4)

We introduced milestones for key events to highlight that every win counts in the fight against the pandemic. The milestones correlated with goals communicated by policy makers and were communicated in an interactive timeline.

The official COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard of Germany received more than 55 million views by more than 8 million people since January 2021. It is available in the most frequently spoken foreign languages in Germany English, Turkish and Russian. It has received a very positive feedback on social media due to its clear and outstanding design, especially compared to other governmental publications. In this way, we believe we have contributed a positive example of how data visualization can enable societies to understand complex topics more effectively.