A case study from Twitter on the benefits of using a design system:
With component-based design, development becomes an act of composition, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
I think that could be boiled down to this:
Component-based design favours composition over invention.
I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m also not saying it’s neutral.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.
Isn’t this just lovely?
Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.
I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Some lovely data visualisation by Brendan:
The work features three main components — the threats, represented by black obelisk style objects, the system which detects and deals with these threats, represented by an organic mesh like structure, and finally the creativity that is allowed to flow because the threats have been neutralised.
This is a nifty visualisation by Hui Jing. It’s really handy to have elements categorised like this:
Chris has made sonic sparklines on his site too, but they’re far more musical than mine. Here’s his explanation of how he did it.
Rob has turned his exhaustive spreadsheet of all the concerts he has attended into a beautiful website. Browse around—it’s really quite lovely!
Rob’s also writing about the making of the site over on his blog.
This orrery is really quite wonderful! Not only is it a great demonstration of what CSS can do, it’s a really accurate visualisation of the solar system.
Vasilis has published his magnificent thesis online. It’s quite lovely:
You can read this thesis in a logical order, which is the way that I wrote it. It starts with a few articles that explore the context of my research. It then continues with four chapters in which I describe the things I did. I end the thesis with four posts with findings, conclusions and recommendations.
A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.
Minimalist cartography.
I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.
This is the trick that Charlotte used to get the nifty blobby effect on last year’s UX London site. Now there’s a tool to help you do the same.
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.
A lovely bit of data visualisation from Nadieh showing the differences and commonalities in constellations across cultures. As always, she’s written up the process too.
Typography meets astronomy in 16th century books like the Astronomicum Caesareum.
It is arguably the most typographically impressive scientific manual of the sixteenth century. Owen Gingerich claimed it, “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”
Some lovely little animation experiments from Cameron.