A blog dedicated to data visualisation, all part of ongoing research for a book on Charles-Joseph Minard.
Data visualisation, interactive media and computational design are one focus of my work, but I also do research in the history of maps and diagrams.
These are beautiful!
Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour.
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).
What these brands are taking from web-brutalism — and truly, we should all be learning something here — is that User-centered design doesn’t need to be monopolized by the same colors, same buttons, same photography and even same copy you see in pretty much every single website or product.
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.
Using a single path SVG, a smidge of CSS, and ~6 lines of JavaScript.
In this days of monolithic frameworks, I really like seeing modest but powerful patterns like this—small pieces that we can loosely join.
Hot nuclear blasts in your area.
(like Eric’s HYDEsim)
I think Khoi might be on to something here …but I also think this change in priorities is no bad thing:
Consider the macro trend of these brands all visually converging alongside the industry’s current mania for design systems. That juxtaposition suggests that we’re far more interested in implementing ideas than we are in ideas themselves.
A social network for snippets of JavaScript effects in canvas, written in 140 characters or fewer. Impressive!
From Scott McCloud to responsive design, Dave is pondering our assumptions about screen real estate:
As the amount of information increases, removing details reduces information density and thereby increasing comprehension.
It reminds me of Edward Tufte’s data-ink ratio.
Data visualisations created for The Times, complete with code.
A JavaScript library for displaying charts’n’graphs.
Luke has been asking people to imagine ways of augmenting the world. Spimes are back, baby!
Nadieh has packaged up the code for her lovely loom diagrams as a plug-in for d3.
Such a great primer on game theory—well worth half an hour of your time.
Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.
Hypnotic.
In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.
Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.
ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.
Can an opinionated flat design still have depth and truly be free of drop shadows?
Scott proposes a technique that mimics atmospheric perspective—y’know, when things in the distance look hazier than things in the foreground.
The fact is, we are surrounded by a world that is full of depth, and very little of it is defined by shadow. If we are going to replace drop shadows in our visual UI metaphors, we should look at other options that create depth in the world around us.
When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”
There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.