Showing the sky above Castlemaine, Victoria

Interactive Star Map

Click on a star to learn about the constellations

Why interactive graphics?

Information can be dense and slow to work through. Interactive graphics let people find their own way into it. They explore at their own pace, follow what catches their eye, and come away understanding something rather than having been told it.

  • More engagement: people spend longer with content they can click, zoom and filter than with content they simply read
  • Clearer understanding: complex information breaks down into manageable layers, revealed one step at a time
  • Personal answers: inputs, sliders and filters give each person results that relate to them
  • Instant feedback: every action gets an immediate visual response, which makes learning and decision-making faster
  • Better recall: hands-on interaction helps people remember what they've learned

Built on real astronomical data

The positions on the wheel come from the same inputs an astronomer uses: latitude, longitude, date and time. Change any of them and the sky moves with you. The design stays deliberately quiet so the data can do the talking.
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The same approach works with almost any live or public data. Australia publishes a wealth of it: weather, tides and UV from the Bureau of Meteorology, census figures from the ABS, real-time public transport, river levels, air quality, and the electricity mix feeding the grid. Your own data works just as well, from sales and membership numbers to survey results or the figures in an annual report. Connected to a graphic like this, it stops being a table and becomes something people want to explore.

Designed and built in Rive

We choose the most efficient, modern tools available, and for interactive graphics that's Rive. It's a relatively young platform, but it has made huge strides in the past few years. Rive brings design and engineering together in one place, so what we design is exactly what runs in your browser, with no hand-off and nothing lost in translation.

It's also remarkably light. Rive files are a fraction of the size of video or traditional animation formats, so pages load quickly and run smoothly on everyday devices. The soft glow around every star uses Vector Feathering, a technique Rive invented to soften vector shapes without the performance cost of a traditional blur. It stays sharp at any size and runs well even on older phones.

The build breakdown:

  • Rive for the animation, state machine and data binding that turn the wheel‍
  • HTML and JavaScript to feed it your location and the current time‍
  • UX: palette, motion and interaction designed to feel intuitive from the first touch, drawing on aspects of Material Design 3, Google's open-source design system ‍
  • Design fundamentals: more than 20 years of experience applying the principles that make design clear, usable and accessible

Who commissions interactive graphics

Interactive graphics help any organisation that needs people to explore, understand or remember something. A tool like this star map suits museums and science centres, schools, tourism and dark-sky destinations, events and apps.They also make memorable campaigns. A brand or organisation running a sky or space themed campaign could use this exact approach, and the same thinking works for any theme where people learn more by exploring than by reading.

Data worth looking up

From live data to annual report figures, we build interactive graphics that people explore, understand and remember.

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