While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.
This ever-growing curated collection of interface patterns on CodePen is a reliable source of inspiration.
Harry describes the process he uses for auditing the effects of third-party scripts. He uses the excellent Request Map which was mentioned multiple times at the Delta V conference.
The focus here is on performance, but these tools are equally useful for shining a light on just how bad the situation is with online surveillance and tracking.
A beautiful visualisation of shipping routes and cargo. Mesmerising!
You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
Hot nuclear blasts in your area.
(like Eric’s HYDEsim)
This is a fascinating way to explore time and place—a spyglass view of hundred year old maps overlaid on the digital maps of today.
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.
You can use Google Maps to explore the worlds of our solar system …and take a look inside the ISS.
Jason lists the stages of gradually turning the Cloud Four site into a progressive web app:
- Jul 13: Our redesign launches
- Oct 3: Service worker added
- Oct 18: More offline functionality and faster performance
- Nov 22: Web notifications
- Dec 7: Small tweaks and “launch”
And you can just keep incrementally adding and tweaking:
You don’t have to wait to bundle up a binary, submit it to an app store, and wait for approval before your customers benefit.
I quite like this proposal for geo element in HTML, especially that it has a fallback built in (like video). I’m guessing the next step is to file an issue and create a web component to demonstrate how this could work.
That brings up another question: what do you name a custom element that you’d like to eventually become part of the spec? You can’t simply name it geo because you have to include a hyphen. geo-polyfill? geo-proposal? or polyfill-geo? proposal-geo?
Fontlandia is yours to explore.
By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.
Danielle and Mark have been working flat out on Fractal. Here’s the roadmap they’re working to.
When it seems like all our online activity is being tracked by Google, Facebook, and co., it comforts me to think of all the untracked usage out there, from shared (or fake) Facebook accounts to the good ol’ sneakernet:
Packets of information can be distributed via SMS and mobile 3G but also pieces of paper, USB sticks and Bluetooth.
Connectivity isn’t binary. Long live the papernet!
In this English language alternative to latitude and longitude coordinates, the Clearleft office is located at:
cross.rooms.quick
A transatlantic cable, hurrah!
Everything you never wanted to know about conveying elevation information on maps, delivered in Peter’s always-entertaining style and illustrated with interactive examples.
A wonderful Zooniverse-like project from the New York Public Library:
Help unlock New York City’s past by identifying buildings and other details on beautiful old maps.
Mappa Mundi Rubrum.