All the Companies Owned by Disney

Cool Infographics: Charts and graphs can communicate data; infographics turn data into information.

After the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, you can see all of the international holdings of the Disney Company in this massive infographic, The Companies Disney Owns, from TitleMax.

Who owns ESPN? Who owns ABC? Does Disney own Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar? The answer is yes, and more — a lot more. We’ve made a map of the companies owned by Disney along with the wide swath of departments and Walt Disney Company subsidiaries. Massive corporations may be too big to grasp sometimes, but this huge list of assets of the Walt Disney Corporation can help media consumers untangle the great network of the mouse.

This is a large, complicated design, and I think it’s worth some discussion.

• I actually like their use of the Mickey shape, with Marvel and Fox as the smaller ears.

• I get that complicated is part of the story here, but there needs to be a better hierarchy of parents to subsidiaries. Better use a a font size hierarchy and the line weight and size of the circles isn’t clear enough. People have a hard time visually comparing circle sizes.

• Another problem with changing the circle sizes is that readers perceive that to have meaning, like the size of these companies, which isn’t true in this case.

• Organization inside the Mickey shape needs some help. These are fairly random shapes and direction of company groupings.

• Yellow on white is never a good idea.

• Use more company logos. Some of them are here, like ESPN and Hulu, but many more of these companies have logos that would have been appropriate to use.

• What are all the company circles on the outside of the Mickey shape? Some explanation is needed.

• Choose rounded or square shapes and stick with it. Don’t go all circles and rounded rectangles, and then put those in sharp cornered squares. Also, be consistent with the corner rounding. Don’t let the software change the corner radius for each different shape.

• The large image size infographic needs to be even higher resolution. At the highest resolution, the smallest text is still pixelated and unreadable.

My biggest question comes down to why is TitleMax doing this infographic in the first place? I don’t understand how this helps the SEO for TitleMax’s website, marketing or their brand equity. This topic just doesn’t have anything to do with their business.

I also say this about a lot of infographics: you need to include the URL of the original infographic landing page in the infographic itself. People are good about sharing the image, but not including the link, so you need to include the URL so readers can find the original on the TitleMax website.