How China Is Flouting WHO’s Plain Packaging Guidelines? by Caixin Media Company Limited

This is a mobile friendly data visualization project produced for the World’s No-Tobacco Day. 11670 items were scraped from the world cigarette website, including package image and fundamental tobacco introduction.

For the project lead, animation storytelling was used to explain WHO’s guidelines of standard cigarette packaging. And then all Chinese packages were released to show the strong contrast between the reality and the guideline.

Then, the main tone for each package was extracted with Python Image Library. Tobacco Package colors of different regions were collected and compared. Chinese packages, red and gold, stand out, which runs counter to WHO’s standards.

In the main page, spectrums of cigarettes packages can be clicked, and the corresponding package will show. In the Chinese version people can even see the name detail of each cigarette.

Besides the color, we also analyzed the graph content on packages with sampling. Through comparing the contents of Chinese and the States’ packages samples, it’s clear that Chinese packages design prefer the great scene views, like Mt. Huang, the Great Wall and so on. By clicking each genre, readers can see the sample packages of each one.

This report reminded people’s awareness of the smoking ban in an unusual way. We believe that the best outcome of visualization is to connect cold raw data with the warmth of real life.