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A printed data zine exploring 45 years of National Park visitation data. Built from public datasets, visualized in Python, designed in Photoshop, and photographed on location at national parks. Made for Communicative Visualization with Evan Peck at CU Boulder, Spring 2026.
45
years of NPS
visitation data
visitation data
63
national parks
across 30 states
across 30 states
8
pages, one sheet
of paper
of paper
page by page
how it was made
- Started with the NPS Recreation Visits dataset (1979–2024) from Responsible Datasets in Context... 2,846 records, 63 parks, no missing values. Explored it in a Google Colab notebook using Python, Pandas, and Altair.
- Pulled in US recession dates from NBER to build the economic stress timeline. Merged recession bands into the Altair chart as shaded regions and added annotations for the 1982 uptick, great recession, covid crash, and rebound.
- Added acreage data from NPS Land Resources Division reports to calculate visitation pressure (visits per acre) across parks. Gateway Arch: 1.2 million visits per acre. Gates of the Arctic: 0.035.
- Developed a color palette and visual style inspired by risograph and screenprint zine aesthetics. All photography is my own, shot on location at national parks.
- Designed all 8 panels in Adobe Photoshop using a desaturate + multiply blend mode technique to integrate photos with flat color backgrounds. Assembled the full 11×17 flat sheet with correct panel positions for the fold-and-cut format.
- Exported with bleed marks and printed at Minuteman Press in Boulder, CO. Folded and cut by hand.
in the wild