providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world

Quote of the Week:

Now with more infographics

Thanks to Betsy and Heather, I've got me a shiny new account over at Behance. It's the official online portfolio of the AIGA, as well, so I'm super-duper covered now.

Not much up yet, seeing as I can't even get time set aside to get my work on the new notchcode site up, but you can check out a dozen or so information graphics and such that I've put up. Let me know what you think of them.

Labels: information graphics, social networking

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8.19.2009

MIT project analyzes the online "you"

Nice data visualization of who you are, at least online. Get yours here.

Tip o' the X-acto knife to Jay Parkinson.

Labels: information graphics

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7.06.2009

Passport Stamps for Fictional Countries

I'm working on a project for a client which has, as a component, stamps for fictional countries. It's a lot of fun, and is a great excuse to look through lots of countries' visa and customs stamps for inspiration. A lot of them are pretty boring (I'm looking at you, United States!), but some are quite fun. Here's an early version of one of the dozen or so I'm creating:

Labels: graphic design, illustration, information graphics

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5.26.2009

Geekchart: a confluence of infographics and geekdom

Want to chart where you spend your time on the social networking inter-tube/?Check out Geekchart. It has listings for almost all the social media portals, including Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, and more (Facebook isn't on there, yet).

Mine's embedded below:


Bucknam's Geek Chart

Thanks to Cool Infographics for the link.

Labels: information graphics, social networking

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4.29.2009

Which workers spend the most time working at home?

Turns out it's arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media people. About 55% of our total weekly work hours are spent working from home (or from an office on a home-based property, one would assume). Not really a surprise, but still interesting to know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is tracking such things.

A few takeaway points from this data: It looks like there's an institutional bias against letting salaried creatives work from home, compared to other service professions whose self-employed hours-worked-from-home is above 16%. Personal care, management, and sales-related workers who are wage-earners and salaried employees all get to work from home more than their salaried brethren in the legal, business & financial, and creative professions. I know that when I was a salaried employee there was strong resistance to allowing creatives the freedom and flexibility of working ex-office. Granted, that was in the late '90s, but it appears that trend has stuck around well into this decade.

The other point is how much time self-employed workers aren't working at home. Nearly 45 percent of the time, creatives are somewhere else. Where? Client offices, off-site meetings, research, and vendor locations are likely candidates. And I am wondering how many of these self-employed workers are in-house contractors, who, while self-employed, have to show up at a client's office and work there.

Here's my take on the chart from the BLS. You can also download a CC-licensed print-quality PDF of it here as well.

Thanks to Planet Money's Laura Conaway for twittering about this data!

Labels: art, design, information graphics, productivity, work

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4.07.2009

When Good Data Gets a Bad Graphic

Cool Infographics posted this chart showing the national debt over the last 33 years. The data are accurate, and the scaling is ok, which makes all of the things that are horrible about how the data are displayed even more relevant.

I can understand the relevance of noting which party was in control of the White House (although a more relevant item might be who was in charge of Congress) but the commentary (""another BUUSH in the White House!") is juvenile, at best. The typography doesn't help much either, if your point is to try and present evidence in the hopes of swaying the opinion of someone who isn't already familiar with the data.

Cool Infographics makes some of these points as well, and notes that

This is a great example of data being visualized with a specific agenda in mind. Obviously, this is a chart framed to make Republicans look bad, and Democrats look good.

...which may be true, but I would argue that information presented in a more objective visual environment would actually make a stronger case for the author's advocated point, rather than the partisan interpretation shown here.

For example: here is the total national debt load, ported into the simplest chart possible:

This is a different representation than the year-by-year increases in the National Debt; however, by showing the total debt (not just the increase for a given year) it places each year's contribution to the Debt into a broader context. Even in this simple representation, partisans could still visually show how the total debt load for the country increased more quickly under the current administration.
Even in this representation there is some unintentional bias: the "floor" of the chart starts at a not insignificant $400 Billion dollars. Granted, that's far below the $9 trillion shown at the end of the series, but it does lead the reader to the assumption that four hundred billion dollars is akin to no debt at all. A better interpretation of the data might look more like this:

Granted, that's not much of a difference. But the visual display now shows that $400 billion in context with the possible floor of Zero debt!


Note: I've had this post sitting around since last August, waiting to find time to create a better version of this. So, if anyone wants to pretty-up this chart (in other words, make it even more visually compelling via some best practices), shoot it over to me and I'll include it in a revised post here. One place to start might be to differentiate between which party had control over the congressional and executive branches during the timespan of the chart....

Labels: information graphics, visual information

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3.31.2009

Even God wants the Old Facebook Back:

From a Facebook Haggadah, by Carl Elkin. Check out the whole thing!


via hgm's twitterstream

Labels: humor, information graphics, interface, social networking, usability

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3.06.2009

Web Interfaces: Not just about the hockey stick, people.

I love the variety of purpose-driven interfaces that you can leverage to deliver info on the web successfully:

This, and a heck of a lot more, here.

Labels: information graphics, interface, usability, web design

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3.03.2009

The official Recovery and Reinvestment Act project logo

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has a logo, which will appear on all projects funded by the Act:

It's nice, I suppose. One interesting thing I noticed is the upper left borders of the two stars that intersect with the blue background border (in the upper left quadrant of the logo) aren't there. These two stars look like they've opened up, blossomed, perhaps, into the white space of the circular inner border.

Another nit-picky thing: the "RECOVERY.ORG" typography is very small. If you're using it at the size you see on this screen, it's about 14 points in size (nice use of old standby Trade Gothic, BTW. Is there a subliminal message to be had there, in the use of a typeface whose name reflects commerce?). When this mark is used in smaller sizes, the type is going to become illegible. I could see this happening when the ARRA money is being used along with other funding for a large project, and promotional roadside signs, posters, and web banners have to fit a lot of logos into a small space (they become, in PR parlance, "bugs".)

The little reverse swiss cross that forms the center of the big gear in the lower right quadrant of the mark...it alludes to the health plan reform, perhaps, as being integral to the recovery?

[3/3/09 22:24] UPDATE: This emblem, along with one specific to transportation projects, was designed by MODE in Chicago. Um, if you don't know by now, they did the Obama "O". (I can't wait for a Denverite to be President: more branding work for us Queen City designers...).

Other comments? Post them below!

image via abc news

by the way: looks like the folks over at recovery.gov are using Numbers for their charting:

Labels: branding, bug, design, graphic design, illustration, information graphics, politics, typography, usability

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2.10.2009

Breaking out of your own self-imposed view of things with SiloBreaker

In researching my last post about Newsweek's redesign article in the New York Times, I found this little site, SiloBreaker, which is an excellent example of innovating a new service that solves a problem created by the very medium it's exploiting. In short, you can enter in a keyword or phrase and get results organized by geographical mapping, trends over time, top people mentioned, and visual network representations of key players. The data is collected from a wide range of news sources, so you're not just getting your news from the same old place. This allows one to look deeply into a topic from a number of geographical, political, economical, and sociological viewpoints.

For example, I browsed through a world map, and clicked on this hotspot poised over Minnesota, and was handed a page dealing with the subject of deportation, illegal immigration, and Liberians=.

There were article links:

And a sidebar of visual mapping information:

very cool, and compact.


Thanks to Loose Wire Blog for the original post!

Labels: information graphics, interface, newspapers, visual information

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2.03.2009

Mapping the Growth of Target

The guys at Cool Infographics just posted this: An interactive map from FlowingData showing the growth of Target, from 1962 to present:

Mapping the Growth of Target: "

Nathan Yau over on FlowingData.com has done a great job creating an animated map showing the growth of Target stores across the U.S.

Well, fortune was smiling on me last week, and I got a hold of data for Target opening dates and locations (thnx, Cole). So here it is - a map that shows the growth of Target from 1962 through 2008.

Nathan has promised to combine the data from this map with his previous work mapping The Growth of WalMart, into one map where you can see the differences.' So we'll keep our eyes out for that."

(Via Cool Infographics.)

Labels: information graphics

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12.29.2008

Leveraging the netizens to edit for you

Change.gov is making government even easier to get involved in. Not only are they providing webcasts of the president-elect, and videos and statements from key personnell, but they are also soliciting questions from everyone, and asking site visitors to rate others' questions. The ones with the most votes get answered in the new year.

Go check it out, and rate some questions yourself.

The tool uses Google Moderator to parse the data. Also worth checking out.

Labels: google, information graphics, interface, nonprofits, politics

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12.08.2008

Great Graphic Design makes everything better

One thing I remind people about all the time: everything anyone has ever made has been designed by someone. Great graphic design makes products, companies, and ideas more accessible by more people. Bad graphic design just makes products, companies, and ideas more opaque.

What differentiates the good from the bad? Lots of things. Focus. Brand integration. Accessibility. Grokability.

Paying someone $150, or $400, to design a logo will almost always result in bad design. Does that mean the designer who made it is not a good designer? Not necessarily. What it does mean is they aren't taking the time to find out what the essence of that brand should be. The same thing goes for paying a similar amount to design a website. Or a brochure. Even if you think about that money in terms of an hourly rate, rather than the value the design has for you (which is really how you should look at it), what does $150 translate to, in hours? I'll tell you: very, very little.

Would you trust a lawyer to draft the articles of incorporation for your business for $50? Would you let a $400 doctor operate on your heart?

Labels: advertising, advice, aiga, b2b, b2c, branding, graphic design, illustration, information graphics, interface, licensing, logo, marketing, nonprofits, packaging, process, ROI, seo, typography, visual information, web design, work

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11.26.2008

Information Graphics for the space geeks

Gizmodo has whipped up a little infographic that compares humanity's real space-based exploration platform, the International Space Station, with some fictional space-going vehicles from our favorite films and television series. Have a look, and you'll see that real life is giving science fiction a run for its money:

Labels: information graphics

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11.25.2008

Gröna Nyckerhålet = GOOD

The Swedes have a lot of things going for them: amazingly beautiful people, enlightened public policies, and--I am just assuming here--an IKEA on every corner. But as my old friend Jen Buley recently pointed out, that's not even the best thing about Sweden. the best thing about it is the Green key.

.The Green Key is a symbol you find on all sorts of food and household goods, and it basically means that a particular product has been produced in a way that is environmentally-, socially-, ethically-, and consumer-friendly is low-fat and/or high in fiber. It's a "green key".

As a graphic symbol, it's very simple: a traditional 19th-century keyhole knocked out of a black circle. Fits very easily on almost any space. And its visual density is great enough to set it apart from the visually gray blocks of text and bar codes that it will inevitably be placed near. Very nice example of good design for a good cause.

Labels: design, icon, illustration, information graphics

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Great Design Firms have Great Clients

A big slice of roasted turkey, heap of mashed potatoes and gravy, and a side of dressing for my wonderful clients and creative partners who have made this year so good (listed here in no particular order):

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The Division of Reclamation, Mining, & Safety

• the signage and exhibition display design projects, in particular were a lot of fun!

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The National Association of Abandoned Mine Lands Programs

• the National Conference branding, website, and print materials turned out great!

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Leichtling & Associates

• 2 new websites and lots of book cover design
  

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Gillingham & Associates

• they were so successful that they were purchased by a larger firm--who kept the existing brand we developed for them
  

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Walker Media

• a new company branding effort and some product photography
  

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Classical Public Radio Network

• ongoing website support
  

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Clear Creek Watershed Foundation

• consulting with them on a branding effort, which helped them clarify their vision
  

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University of Denver College of Law

• work on a to-be-completed project, that is shaping up to be awesome
  

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Colorado Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention

• design and production of their annual report of pregnancy and prevention-related issues in Colorado [PDF]
  

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Native American Community Development Corporation

• an excellent website design, which is almost ready to launch
  

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Whitman Interior Design

• we're creating their website as I write this
  

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Carl Socolow

• we designed an excellent website for this Guggenheim-recipient photographer

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Andrew Bale

• a website design and subequent revision for another great photographer
  

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Tamzin Architecture

• notchcode did brand identity development and a website (in development) for this Evergreen-area architect

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Rhombus CGI

• a website design which builds on their existing branding and raises their profile

Labels: branding, design, graphic design, information graphics, web design

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11.12.2008

I, for one, welcome our new Google-enabled Health Overlords

Google is tracking the geographic distribution of search queries related to the flu, and has assembled a chart that shows us how worried we should be about getting the flu this year.

The data is shown in 2 graphics: one is a map of the US which is color-coded by state to show the relative danger of getting the flu at this moment. The other graphic is a line graph showing the flu danger now, relative to past years. You can see the historical data running along with this year's data. You can also view data on a state by state basis, if you are only looking out for yourself.

Right now, it looks like I can breathe easy ( I also got my flu shot, thank you very much, and you should, too!). If the historical trends for Colorado are any indication, I should get more concerned around mid-January.

Labels: information graphics

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11.11.2008

Too Much Information

Well, the internet is all about information. This site from sprint (screenshot of just a portion of the huge interface below) has lots of it. Because the internet is all about knowing how many seconds remain until doughnut day....

via kottke

Labels: information graphics, interface

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11.04.2008

NY Times' Front Page county-by-county electoral results map

The New York Times is featuring county by county results on its front page results map this evening. This lets people see the results come in on a very detailed level of granularity. Nice information design, once again....It's a Flash-based map, and by the end of the election will show a finely-resolved picture of who people want to run their country for the next four years.

From Jim Roberts' notes on their coverage:

All of the coverage will be accessible from the homepage of nytimes.com. Starting at around 6 p.m. Eastern time, when polls close in a handful of states, we’ll be presenting you with two versions of the United States map: a statewide view that will allow you to track each state as it is called (or as each candidate builds up a lead), and a county-by-county view that will display the counties in which returns have begun to arrive. The counties will be shaded according to the candidate who is ahead.

The states on each map are clickable; that allows you to zoom in on a state and then by rolling your mouse over each county, you’ll get to see up-to-the-minute vote totals for each county as well as the percentage of precincts reporting. So for instance when the results start coming in from Florida, one of our favorite election-night states, you’ll be able to check out returns in Pinellas County or Palm Beach County or Pasco County, just by scooting your mouse over the zoomed-in map.

Yes, you can see this sort of information on television, but we let YOU decide which states and counties you want to explore.

And if you haven't gotten out to vote yet, what are you waiting for? GO VOTE!

Labels: information graphics, politics

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10.17.2008

Fun activity for this weekend? Early voting!

Usually my weekend activities at this time of year revolve around gardening, starting to design Notchcode's holiday card (and holiday cards for my clients. Clients: need a holiday card? It's probably time to get started!). But since it's an election year, and I live in Colorado, I'll be filling out my state's four page mail-in ballot.


Four pages? Yes sir! We've got all sorts of amendments, referenda, and county, district, state, and national candidates to vote on. It's Colorado's longest ballot in 96 years. I suspect I will not be alone in voting for the amendment which makes it harder to get amendment questions onto the ballot, since we are all pretty tired of having every little thing written into the state constitution, rather than being enacted as a law. Some may call me short-sighted, and unamerican. Whatever; I just want to take less time to actually fill in my ballot than I do filling out my tax returns.

I want to take this democracy-reated moment to remind you all about the AIGA's project to make ballots easier to understand, process, and be counted for everyone. I have written about it twice, here and here. check it out, and follow the links there to the site with the sample ballot designs. It's very cool, and if you are in a position to recommend changes to your local ballot's design, your fellow citizens would thank you if you helped to implement some of the changes shown here.

Labels: graphic design, information graphics, politics

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9.17.2008

The FitBit: another great design, both on the industrial and on the web side

I am not one for "dieting", although by definition all of us are on one sort of diet or another. The most effective thing I've done is eat less, and exercise more. Sure, what you eat can make things easier, or more or less tempting to fall off the wellness wagon, but as a basic principle, Bloom County pretty much summed it up best:

I ran across an article about the FitBit, which looks like a great way to get thousands of people to become more aware of their fitness level, exercise, and quality of sleep. The great thing is how unobtrusive the design of the actual hardware is, and how intuitive the online interface is as well. Check it out:

The hardware design:

And a sample web page interface:

This overview screen is loaded with information, without being overwhelming. HIgh-quality and high-density infographics!

Labels: design, information graphics

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7.28.2008

What We're Reading Online

I thought I'd share some of the content that is informing our work, seeping into our consciousness, and making us smile.

The Big Picture. This visual blog takes advantage of the fact today's monitors allow us to see big images onscreen. Each Big Picture post presents several images with a common theme. It's a wonderful bit of online photojournalism, and a big inspiration. Some recent favorites: photos from the Tour de France, Xenophobia in South Africa, and Images of Jupiter.

The Denver Egotist. This anonymous blog shows and tells various design/agency projects coming out of the Denver area. it's occasionally juvenile and snarky, but lately has been growing up into something more than a space for ranting, trollbaiting commentators. They bring some interesting design and campaign news to our notice, and for that we'll overlook the occasional misfire.

Logo Design Love. It's all about the visual identity here. Good posts on good logos, bad logos, and occasionally similar logos.

Cool Infographics. A well-executed infographic is better than a good-looking piece of design. And it's more than art. It's a visual expression of hard data or process that makes the viewer come to a more complete understanding of that data or process.

In that same vein, there's Subtraction, the blog of nytimes.com's design director, Khoi Vinh. As the person responsible for guiding the interactive visualization of the New York Times's content, Mr. Vinh has a lot to shoulder, and he does it well. Not only does he have some great talent backing him up at nytimes.com, but his personal expressions of visual information design show he's the captain of the ship there, as well.

The Design Observer. This design blog is edited by three of the biggies in the design world: Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, and Jessica Helfand; and lists contributors that anyone who has picked up an AIGA annual in the last ten years would know by their designs, if not by name. Ms. Helfand's nostalgic post on the good old days of press rooms filled with make-readys made me remember my earlier days, and made me a little wistful for zipatone and rubylith, too.

So, there's your reading list for today, young blog-reader. Enjoy!

Labels: advertising, creativity, denver egotist, design, information graphics, photography, print, printing, writing

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7.18.2008

(Relatively) New work from us: 200 Essential Pieces in Classical Music Booklet premium piece

Last year, The Classical Public Radio Network, a consortium of classical public radio stations scattered across the country, asked us to design an inspiring premium print piece to send to higher-value donors. Their idea was some sort of listing of not just the 200 most important pieces in classical music, but the 200 most important performances as well. The list had to contain artist information, composer, featured conductors, soloists, and the recording's catalog number, enabling people to quickly find the recording and purchase it. We produced a key to the listings, featured near the front of the piece:


This is a lot of information, and pretty dry stuff. But it's the sort of list a true classical music enthusiast would really enjoy. The challenge was to present the information in a way that:

• was easily accessible,


• engaged the content with the viewer in a compelling way, and


• had an enduring, lasting value that would make the user keep the piece around for a long time.

It was decided to present the pieces chronologically, arranged by date of composition. Below the list, we created a timeline showing the lifespans of the eras' major composers, as well as notable historic and musical events that took place. The dates of the timeline on any given spread corresponded with the pieces listed above them:


Throughout the booklet we also included features on some of the world's iconic performance halls and spaces: the Paris Opera House, the Tomaskirche, the Disney Concert Hall, and others. This helped to break up the list into more visually manageable chunks:



The client was an excellent collaborator, including a lead who knew her stuff, and what her audience would respond to: Karla Walker; and one of my writing pals from my University of Denver days, Jon Pinnow. We had amazing printing help from Tamera Rice-Ehrman at Sprint Press/Denver. They made the strike-through dull/gloss spot varnishes we used on the cover (subtly imprinting the composers' names over the front of the piece, and emphasizing graphic blocks and timelines inside the booklet), as well as making my 4-color quadtones look great (done in three colors of warm gray plus black).

By all measures, the piece was a success; it was a valuable draw when used in combination with other premiums at the $1,200 level and above, and both the client's stakeholders and recipients polled about the piece loved it. It's a piece that will continue to work for the client for a long time to come.

Labels: design, graphic design, information graphics

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6.23.2008

VIrtual Water: today's nice infographic

The Virtual Water Project has designed a nice poster showing the amount of water it takes to grow certain consumables. AN excerpt from the site:

The main intention of this poster is to show how much freshwater is used to produce selected products - hoping for people to rethink their consumption patterns. The visualization of nation’s footprints tries to draw the big picture and sensitize for local problems in differnt parts of the world.
The poster is rather a rough summary of the virtual water issue, than a step-by-step instructions to lower your personal water footprint.

While it isn't a guide on how to lower your water footprint, it does make you aware of how much raw energy (in this case in the form of water) is needed to make, say, the hamburger you had for lunch.

Raise a glass of H2O to the Strange Attractor for pointing us to this.

Labels: information graphics

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6.05.2008

Where the Democratic Candidates got their votes: some variations on the NY Times graphic

Amanda Cox and Farhana Hossain at the New York Times put together a graphic showing where in the US Obama and Clinton got their votes during the grueling, historic five month primary season this year. It's (as always) a nice visual explanation (click on any of the images to enlarge them):


While this is an accurate representation of the votes each candidate got, I noticed that it reflected some more general trends, in terms of geography. Obama did well in a wide swath from Philadelphia, down the east coast, and then well into Texas, for example. Clinton had support through the New England/Allegheny/Appalachia/South-Central portion of the midwest, and on down into rural Texas.

In terms of looking at this in a more general geographic sense, the precise circles of vote tallies made these broader areas of influence more segmented. So, in a spare ten minutes I made a couple of variations on Cox and Hossain's map that (while admittedly far less accurate) show the more general voting geography:

This one takes the green and blue colors the Times has used throughout the campaign to display Obama and Clinton votes and gives them a higher degree of color contrast by placing them in red and blue. Already I think the broader geographic trends are more visible. But I wanted to smear the data a little more, so I did just that: a little gaussian blur, followed by some increase in contrast, then a filling of the selected areas with a flat color (note that my half-assed casual attempt results in some obvious inaccuracies in which candidate got votes in some of the smaller datasets....now that I've mentioned it, feel free not to pick at me for it):


Now, this is a very general graphic, compared with the original. In many ways it is inaccurate. But it also helps to give a general picture of the topography of the race. I think there is some value in this, and I am sure that with the precinct-by-precinct data available to both the politicos and the journalists that create visual representations of a campaign a more accurate and at the same time more general picture of such campaign results (or polls or projections) could be generated. I'd love to see them, alongside the more traditional visual information graphics that we have become accustomed to seeing at the Times.

Labels: information graphics, politics, visual information

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It's like a highly erudite game of Tetris

I know, I am an admitted fanboy of the nytimes.com information graphics staff, but with flash-enabled interactive data like this, who wouldn't be?

Labels: information graphics, visual information

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5.21.2008

Data Visualization: Making traffic patterns understandable

Steph Thirion, an interaction designer, has been creaeting some elegant tools for visualizing data dynamically. My favorite so far is Cascade on Wheels. One version (shown above) shows traffic flow overlaid dynamically on conventional aerial photograph...and then lets you turn that photo on its side, revealing a three-dimensional bar chart of the flow through the streets of a city. Another shows traffic flow on an overhead map, but allows you to also hear the data: the denser the traffic, the louder the white noise. Bringing in not just your eyes, but your ears, is brilliant.

Tip o the cap to Jay Parkinson for bringing Steph's work to my attention.

Labels: information graphics, interface, visual information

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5.05.2008

A cellular or stained-glass view of the tanking economy, and how it affects the consumer

Amanda Cox over at The New York Times online has a nice interactive graphic of "All of Inflation's LIttle Parts." It shows a snapshot of the average consumer's spending on basically everything, from cable tv to heating oil. Roll over each of the segments to get data on increases or decreases in costs for that item.

What I like: Since we all spend a finite amount of money on everything, it's a closed system; therefore a circle is a good way of representing the whole. What makes this different from a typical pie chart (and better, I think) is that there are main sections (like housing and utilities, versus clothing, for example) and then many little categories within those sections, that we can view here.

Now, you could group your pie-chart slices up and show it that way, but I think this makes the smaller categories easier to view and inspect, especially online. Have a look and let me know what you think of this vs. a pie chart.

Labels: information graphics, newspapers, visual information

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4.23.2008

ok, so I am working out right now. even as I blog.

Here's a lovely bit of graphic design interpretation from calorielabs.com. Several states are featured, and I can't decide whether or not I like New Mexico's or South Carolina's flag-as-infographic better. What do you think?

My own interpretation of the Colorado state flag is below:



thanks, Cool Infographics!

Labels: graphic design, humor, information graphics, visual information

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4.22.2008

Google Mashup of the week: Real-time voting results

It's been six weeks since I had my political junkie fix, so I waited eagerly tonight for the Pennsylvania Primary results to come in. Thanks to the folks at google, however, I could review voting stats in real-time, with the results keyed to a map. I've embedded the widget below for you to try out. The county-by-county graphs are handy for comparing various demographics, as well, and (if not for the odd color choices used in the graphs) are a nice addition.

Check it out:

Labels: cartography, google, information graphics

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4.21.2008

Lifestreaming: Aggregating all your social networking crap.

So, want Microsoft's ever-present life-recording tool, but don't want to wait for it to be invented? Find a lifestreaming tool. I've found one that seems promising: Dipity. It collects a bunch of your social networking data from places like twitter, Facebook, flickr, Picasa, blogger blogs, and pretty much any RSS feed, and places items from those feeds on a timeline. Lots of ways to view them, and it looks like they will be expanding their automated importing options, too. My import went well, although it (for some reason) missed all my blog posts from 2002-05, as well as other posts here and there farther back, which was a bit odd. Maybe it's still importing them (I just started an account literally minutes ago). If you have a chance, check out my timeline. And tell me what you think of the interface.

I think it's a good first step for a timeline interface, but it's a bit clunky when you have a ton of info all in one space of time. You can zoom in to the day level of detail, which brings out each event, but it would be nice to see a more intuitive way of viewing the density of events across a wider span of time. You Tufte-ites will know what I mean.

Labels: information graphics, interface, visual information

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Ask the Design Director of nytimes.com a question

Designers: ever want to know why the New York Times' website looks or operates the way it does? What decisions go into the user interface and information architecture? Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, is answering questions from readers April 21-25. Questions may be sent to askthetimes@nytimes.com. from the Times article about Mr Vinh:

As design director, Mr. Vinh leads a group of 11 visual designers, information architects and design technologists in continually improving and extending the user experience at NYTimes.com. Mr. Vinh also writes and lectures extensively about design and technology, and serves on the national board of directors for AIGA, the professional association for design.

Labels: design, information graphics, interface, newspapers, web design

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4.16.2008

Watch the outliers: an information graphic

This is one of the twenty-something graphics I created for a book on Participatory Action Research, called (aptly enough) Participatory Action Research for Educational Leadership: Using Data-Driven Decision Making to Improve Schools, by E. Alana James, Margaret T. Milenkiewicz, and yours truly. The graphic pertains to outliers, and keying in on them when examining constituencies within a learning environment. From Chapter 11: Educational Leadership:

[this graphic] displays a school, showing both the diversity and clustering of activity within the main influences of the staff and student populations and the few instances where entirely different forces are at work. Leaders at all levels within complex environments such as this illustration continually need to evaluate the questions presented by individuals on the fringe

Speaking from personal experience, I can attest to this. From the time I became a teenager until I graduated from college, I was an outlier within my educational environment. Like a substantial minority of kids, I dressed differently, made different decisions on my educational focus (art! band! philosophy! eek!) and enjoyed being unpredictable enough--at least in the eyes of my peers--that I could fit in with anyone, without really being of any particular group (except for when I was). I never gave educators a headache, but I was an outlier in many ways, and there were enough of us that I am sure we had to be dealt with in a special way--even if it was just to give us a special activity or class to occupy us and keep us out of trouble and enrich us at the same time.

Outliers are more than just social groups. As the book states,

Outliers may also indicate the start of important trend. Imagine how strong the academic potential of a school the created a robust [English as a Second Language] department as immigration emerged in the neighborhood rather than waited until the challenge became overwhelming.

So the outlier becomes the hub of "normal" within a few years, and those who weren't paying attention missed the boat.

As to the diagram: I think it does a good job of showing the variety in a typical educational environment, along with the clustering-with-overlapping-and-connecting elements that are present in any catholic environment (bonus points to my readers who know the nonreligious meaning of "catholic", by the way :) In the book it's black and white, but I present it here as displayed in the book's precursor, which was a web-based professional development tool.

If I was developing this solely for the web today, I'd animate it using Flash, to show the change of outliers becoming the norm over time, as well as showing how people within the "norm" move around, how groups wax and wane in popularity and population, and in general showing how dynamic the educational environment really is.

Labels: alana, illustration, information graphics, PAR, visual information

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4.01.2008

Information equals power: Zimbabwe

Mapping the election conditions in Zimbabwe is Sokwanele. Their post from March 11th has been built upon and added to and contains on-the-ground reports of voter coercion, vote buying, political abductions, voter unrest, and other symptoms of a very tense situation surrounding the elections in Zimbabwe. It's today's best use of GoogleMaps, and a nice bit of information delivery.

I think it's obvious what this sort of information can do for people who want to make a difference. The more detailed your level of information is, the better you can right wrongs, address challenges, and make informed policy decisions.

Two things that would make it better: less-detailed iconography and hyperlinks to the specific events that are detailed in the map. (via boingboing.net)

Labels: cartography, google, information graphics

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3.29.2008

Best Use of GoogleMaps for today

A BBC article touting the European Space Agency's automated cargo transport carrier system, named "Jules Verne", has--buried way down at the bottom of the article--has a map of where the International Space Station and the Jules Verne are over the Earth at any given moment, updated each second. Pretty nifty. The source for the map is here. So, want to know if you can see the ISS over your house? Check out the map and see!

Labels: google, information graphics

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3.06.2008

Behind the Scenes at the NYT Graphics Department

The New York Times' Graphic Director, Steve Duenes, took reader questions last week. The interview is filled with insights into how the NYT's crack graphic staff creates the award-winning work that appears both online and in print.

And in case you still don't believe that graphic design can change lives, just check out this quote, from Nicholas Kristof, who was relating a story about the impact graphics that were designed to accompany his article on the state of public health in Africa had on one particular individual: Bill Gates. Gates was telling him how, initially, he and his wife were planning on essentially wiring the continent, thinking that this would do the most good in bringing Africa out of poverty. Then he read Kristof's article, and decided funding public health initiatives for clean drinking water, malaria prevention, and the like would have a far greater impact. He continues:

Great! I was really proud of this impact that my worldwide reporting and 3,500-word article had had. But then bill confessed that actually it wasn't the article itself that had grabbed him so much -- it was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health.

No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in africa and asia.

[emphasis added]

So, what moves the richest couple in the universe to make Africa a healthier place to live? Good graphic design. It doesn't need to be flashy, it doesn't need to be hip. It needs to work: deliver information effectively. This is what I tell my clients, and I swear by it. Effective information delivery--whether it's for marketing, advocacy, or journalism--isn't about clever, hip, new, etc.... It's about presenting everything you need to present, and nothing extra, in a succinct, direct way. It's that simple.

Labels: advice, africa, graphic design, information graphics, visual information

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2.08.2008

Door as Power Plant: Looks like a famous work of art to me!

Found this neat idea for a revolving door at Fluxxlab (via Gizmodo) that generates power from the people pushing it this morning. Nice design concept, and the graphics to show off the concept and process are lovely. But it does look a bit like the structure in one of my favorite pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Have a look:




and here is a wonderful deconstruction of Duchamp's schema for his work, by Andrew Stafford:



(here's a detail of the bottom panel of the original Duchamp work too, which you must go see if you are anywhere near the Philadelphia Museum of Art:)

Labels: art, duchamp, illustration, information graphics

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2.04.2008

What Party are Creatives Supporting for President?

The Huffington Post has a fundraising exploration tool that uses Google's API to visually map donations to political candidates, and it provided me with a whole evening of fun (which explains why it's a good thing I'm married and not out trying to pick up a future mate). After virtually stalking my neighbors to see who was giving to Mitt Romney and who was giving to Barack Obama, I noticed that I could search donations by occupation. I entered in a few occupations in the creative field: "graphic designer", "creative director", "web developer", and so on. It was very illuminating. More importantly, this query provided me with a nice little dataset to make infographics out of. And now you can enjoy them too. (Click on any graphic to enlarge to about 1280 pixels wide)



The first chart takes the raw amounts of cash donated to Democrat and Republican candidates for president, grouped first by party donated to, and segmented within those groups by occupation. You can see that creatives are donating overwhelmingly to the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. In raw dollar amounts, it's about two to one. And look at those photographers! Man, they (meaning, in part, me) must be getting paid way too much to be giving all that dough out (actually, it's due to the larger number of photographers that donate, relative to other occupations).



So, now we know that creatives seem to support Dems over the GOP. But that brought me to a finer point: if you are, say, an art director, are you more likely to give to a Democrat or to a Republican? Remember, the first chart simply shows the total amount given. Within each party's breakdown, you get a feel for total amounts given by production artists versus ad execs, for example, but remember, there might be just one or two P.A.'s giving money, and a whole lot of ad-men donating, skewing the relative data. That's what brings me to the next set of graphics:

The second and third graphics show the relative amounts given by each occupation to Democrats and Republicans. The numbers are standardized to the largest pool of donors (those profligate photographers)at a 1:1 ratio between Dem-donating shooters and GOP-loving imagemakers. Now we can use the data to estimate if you are more likely to give to Clinton or to McCain, if you are an illustrator:



The third graphic overlays the data blobs for each occupation's Democrat and Republican donors, to help visually compare relative giving preferences. Which do you think works better?


One analysis suggests that art directors and photographers tend to be the most split groups, with nearly equal likelihood that you would give cash to either party. It also shows that we need to pay illustrators and production artists a hell of a lot more money before they give some of it away to candidates (or they are just really smart and spend the cash on more important things, like beer and espresso).

One thing this proportional representation doesn't factor in are the total number of donors for republicans versus democrats. Obviously, if there was just one Republican donor for each occupation (and they gave a lot of money), the relative charts above wouldn't work. But in general terms, I think it's a nice representation (this is why I am an information presenter and not a pure statistician...if you can give me figures adjusted for total number of donors, send it to me and I'll make new graphics!)

So, that's my two cents before Super Tuesday. Now: no matter who you support, go and make your voice heard and GO VOTE!

Labels: design, illustration, information graphics, politics, visual information, whitespace

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