michelle rial shows us quantitative and qualitative data for, uh, everything

introspective turmoil, boring charts, comedy — we’ve experienced all of these things, usually individually. @realifecharts is michelle rial’s resourcefully low-budget, polyamorous instagram-wedding of the three. with a handful of small, shaky lines, some all caps’d text, an oval or two, and ironically corporate scatter plots, venn diagrams and pie charts, she describes first-world-growing-pains — things like germ-anxiety, caffeine dependency, and farting. her results are quantifiably hilarious charts, the hard data she’s gathered, while fiddling with headphones on the train.

all images courtesy of michelle rial

rial reminds us that, sometimes, the success of a relationship is as predictable as the 90 degree angle on an allen key. she turns debatable opinions, into emotionally accessible observations, withdrawn of all emotion. she gives us facts — maslow’s heiarchy of instagram. the march madness bracket results for sour patch kid flavors (yellow beat green in the final two).  is this a fact? rial points out that, in her mind, it is. 

while almost none of these ‘real life charts‘ are factual (relationships don’t always go downhill after a trip to IKEA; we do more on a train than untangle headphones; red is the tastiest sour patch kid), rial’s insights are so relatable to so many people, that fans of her work see her illustrations as tested, highly-researched data. and it most certainly is. not all of her work is lighthearted; the same mediums she uses to highlight sour patch kid flavors, she also uses to point out serious societal issues, such as sexual harassment.