Olympic Medal Count Map

The New York Times never fails to impress with their interactive info graphics. They have some great Olympic graphics currently on their site including this Olympic Medal Count Map, which animates a world map based on the amount of medals each country wins at the Olympics over the years, ending with this year's current count.

Movie Box Office Charts

Movie Box Office Charts are illustrations created by Zach Beane. Each chart tracks a year's worth of movies, showing the top 25 movies for every weekend. The movies from each week are color coded, allowing you to easily track how long the movie stayed in the charts and how its ranking changed over time. (Found through Neoformix).

Music Animation Machine

I attended Edward Tufte's class today. The class itself wasn't as inspiring as I had hoped for. I was inspired by the class's opening example - this Music Animation Machine by Stephen Malinowski. The Music Animation Machines visualizes music by animating the notes one on top of the other. The effect is very beautiful and allows you to see the complexity of the compositions. The Music Animation Machine is not new, it was first animated in the mid 80's, which is part of what I like about it.

Pulse

Pulse is a live visualization of recent emotional expressions written on blogger.com. Blogged emotional expressions are parsed using a list of synonyms which are translated into physical changes on a rubbery heart. This project has a fascinating mix of human emotions and computer data data. Feelings are coded as data in blogs, and the data is turned back into Pulse, an object with its own sense of life. I appreciate that the end result seems very alive, but very robotic at the same time. It appropriately represents the mix of warm emotions and cold data that are feeding it. Pulse is the thesis project of University of the Arts Berlin student, Markus Kison. (Found through Computerlove).

Barcode Plantage

German design student, Daniel A Becker, had created this great interpretation of a barcode reader. Barcode Plantage is a barcode visualizer, programmed using Processing. The program turns barcodes into coloured Bezier curves, complete with an auditory interpretation and definition of some of the number's meanings. Prints of the barcodes are available for $7 each.

Extinction Timeline

This trending map has taken a slightly backwards but highly effective approach. Instead of showing when technologies or trends will take off, the Extinction Timeline shows when things will no longer exist in any significant way. It provides a really great perspective of the future. I'm not looking forward to the 2025 years when we will lose work-free weekends, blogging and most upsetting, the Maldives (note to self: book trip soon). (Found through Swissmiss).

F**k Grapefruit

I Ffffound this chart today created by xkcd. I've been having chart and graph woes this week (if you are a long time reader this will not be a shock to you), so I found this chart particularity enjoyable. It graphs fruits based on their ease of consumption vs their tastiness. I'm not sure I agree with all the fruit placement. Peaches are not that easy to eat and tomatos are good! My favorite part of this image is the title - F**k Grapefruit.

All of Inflation's Little Parts

The New York Times Online often impresses me with its great online interactive graphics. I noticed this one earlier this week. It is an info graphic to visualize the spending changes that are affecting inflation in the US. Each shape represents a different category; showing how much the average American spends and how spending in that category has changed over the past year. I like that they are playing on the idea of a soap bubble for their graphic... very inflation appropriate.

Country Codes

This map of the internet country codes is really nice to look at. I wouldn't use it as an information resource (I mean, who uses .US anyway?) but it's a great graphic. Available as a poster from Byte Level.

Designing The News

I'm enjoying Dave Bowker's website, Designing The News. Dave describes the site as "A series of experiments which visually explore the news in various ways to encourage new ways of seeing a predominantly text based medium." David has a cool throwing-it-out-there approach to his ideas which I appreciate.

I was attracted to his most recent visualization experiment, One Week of The Guardian: Wednesday. Each circle represents a different news category, arranged from the center outwards according to each category's total word count. His idea expands out to link the category rankings from one day to another to track a whole year's worth of news stories. This is a cool overall visualization. It reminds me a bit of the Digg Labs work, but with a rockn' retro color scheme.

Invisible Journeys

Oli Laurelle has created these interesting visuals to depict wireless networks along a journey. The image above shows a journey in time (starting at the 3 o'clock position and moving clockwise) from the Barcelona city center to the airport, by train. Each "pin" represents a unique WiFi source. I'm not exactly sure how to interpret these visuals as any sort of map or story, but they sure are fascinating pieces of art. (Found through Visual Complexity).

New York Talk Exchange

NYTE (New York Talk Exchange) is part of MIT's Senseable City Lab projects that look at how we describe and understand cities as technologies change. NYTE is a series of real time visualizations showing internet and telephone traffic flowing into and out of New York City. I particularly liked the World Inside New York visual showing what parts of the world New Yorkers were calling. It gives some interesting insight into the inhabitants of different neighbourhoods. The communications patterns draw attention to the relationship New York has with the rest of the world. It would be interesting to see these stats tracked over time.

The Shape of Family

I stumbled across the stunning information graphics of Christina Van Vleck today. I was particularly drawn to her Shape of Family project (shown above). It's a series of 5 graphics that depicts the family lines of herself and her 4 sets of grandparents. This is a nice, clean way of depicting a family tree. The circular shape takes lends itself to the expanding shape of the generations. Very nice.

River Glow

An important step in environmental change is to raise awareness. River Glow's raises awareness about water pollution by using a simple visual indicator to communicate water quality. Designed by The Living, River Glow is a floating system that monitors a river's pH level and gives off red or green light to indicate pollution levels. The system is energy self-sufficient, with energy supplied by one of a few experimental energy generating devices. The suspended light of River Glow has a certain artistic quality to it that reflects the beauty of the water it's trying to protect.

Current State Concept

Check out this Current State concept that I worked on for Kaleidoscope's The Greener Grass project. Current State is a conceptual mobile application used to monitor and control energy usage in your home. The concept was inspired by our discussions about energy consumption and how to teach people to take responsibility and control over their energy usage. The conceptual application allows users to set energy goals for themselves and then monitor how well they are meeting those goals. Current State also gives users remote control over powered devices within their home. Users can turn devices on or off, as well as setting up automatic timers to maximize their energy efficiency.

Cinema Redux

Cinema Redux explores the idea of viewing an entire movie in one image. The above picture is a section of images taken from the movie Taxi Driver at one second intervals. The larger resulting picture shows some interesting poetic editing elements and insight into the overall tone and flow of the movie. I'd love to see one for a really color intensive movie such as Hero. This project was created by Brandan Dawes using the ever more popular open source programing language, Processing. (Found through Andre Brocatus was here...)

Naming Names

Naming Names is an awesome interactive visualization created by Jonathan Corum and Farhana Hossain of The New York Times. The graphic examines how long the presidential candidates spoke at each debate leading up to the Iowa caucuses and who mentioned the other candidates by name during those debates. The bands around the outside represent each of the debates in order. The width of the ban shows the amount of words spoken in that debate. Scrolling over the politician's names isolates the arrows indicating who mentioned them during the debates. Clearly Mrs. Clinton was viewed as the biggest threat, as her name has by far the most arrows coming from both parties. (Found through the GOOD Magazine Blog).

Borders

Borders is an interesting approach to a world map. It features countries represented by blocks, sized and arranged to show bordering land or water masses. Although it's technically still a map, what it shows almost more of a political statement then a geographical one. This map was created by the inspiring young graphic artist and thinker Robin Howie.

BBC's British History Timeline

The BBC's British History Timeline is a (insert best British accent here...) gorgeous (...end accent) way to brush up on your British history. It's a simple but sophisticated interactive timeline that lets you explore significant events in British history from 862BC to today.

BookScape

BookScape is an interesting concept for a online library archive. It was created by Michael Chang of Yahoo's Design Innovation Team. The project focuses on creating an interface that allows access to digital versions of 2600 illustrated children's books. Images of the scanned books are arranged alphabetically. Dynamic resampling is used to efficiently show all the images at once in one zoomable space. Zooming out allows quick navigation of the entire collection. Zooming in gives you more finite navigation control. This project reminds me a bit of some of the thinking behind Microsoft's amazing Photosynth that I wrote about earlier this year.

Distellmap

Ben Fry is a fabulous designer/artist/computer scientist who focuses on visualizing data. This project, called Distellamap, (a spin-off of Dismap) highlights the beauty of code. The project features the code of 6 different Atari games overlaid with curves to show its 'go to' elements. The visualization emphasizes the flow of the code, showing it off as a complex piece of poetry. (Found most recently through Pica + Pixel).

Planet Earth - Directions for Use

'Planet Earth - Directions for Use' was Angie Rattay's entry for the Designboom 'Love Your Earth' graphic design competition. It is a series of four instructional pamphlets designed to resemble medical directions packed into a small prescription style box. Each manual focuses on a different part of the Earth; the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, and the lithosphere/pedosphere. Each set of 'directions' includes information about its relative part of the Earth and instructions on how readers can reduce their impact on that area. I would love a copy of this. It seems incredibly well thought out and executed.

Andrew Kuo

Dear Andrew Kuo, please be my friend. I've seen into your brain and decided that you are awesome.

New York based artist Andrew Kuo has made me once again second guess all of the negative things I've ever said about charts and graphs. Andrew creates the most intriguing editorial charts. They don't display actual quantifiable information, it's more like charting thoughts. For example take this chart commentary on a summer of concerts at McCarren Park Pool. It features graphs entitled 'How upset am I at missing the bands I missed' and 'My summer mood swings'. They display semi-useless information in a gorgeous and fascinating way. For more of Andrew Kuo's work, check out his blog or his contributions the The New York Times online. (Found through Cool Hunting).

Crazy Egg

There are lots of ways to gather and view statistics about your website. Crazy Egg has some great ways to track clicking patterns, which are all about the visualization. You can track clicks using Overlays, Confetti, or a Heatmap. All of which show you exactly were visitors clicked and with what intensity. I really like the Heatmap option (shown above). It visualizes clicks as if they are generating heat. The greater the number of clicks, the hotter the link appears.

Belkin N1 Vision

I found myself in Best Buy a few weeks ago staring at the Belkin N1 Vision and daydreaming about how I could sabotage my own wireless router to justify buying this one. My desire was not without reason. This router has a lot of great features including CD-less installation and a vertical orientation to reduce its footprint on your desk/floor/whatever. The really big improvement that they have made over other routers is adding a screen. The display shows all sorts of useful information such as upload and download speeds, current wireless users connected, and activity over the past 24 hours. This makes the router an valuable part of your internet setup and not just a box with blinking lights under your desk.

Pet Shop Boys Integral Video

The Pet Shop Boys worked with creative group The Rumpus Room to create the latest version of their Integral video. The song was written as a type of protest against ID cards in the UK. There are two really interesting things about this video. The first is that they are using 2D barcodes (or QR codes) to provide additional information. The barcodes can be read by enabled cellphones. Each QR code in the video contains a URL linking to relevant information. To download a QR code reader for your phone or to create one for your own URL, visit Kaywa.

The second really interesting thing about this video is that the Pet Shop Boys are encouraging people to make their own version of the Integral video. They have provided all the stop frames in a 1451 page downloadable pdf, as well as created a group on Youtube to post your video edit to.

Delicious DNA

Juliana Yamashita, of the Yahoo Design and Innovation Team, has a special interest in alternative ways of displaying data. One of her recent projects, called Delicious DNA, caught my attention. It graphically illustrates common tags of Del.icio.us users who are interested in Design. Patterns in the tags start to emerge highlighting trends and buzz words within the design community.

Worried about Alien Abduction?

Do you lie in bed at night fretting about how you will get back to Earth after your next alien abduction? Well fret no more. A solution is finally here. For a mere $12.99 you can purchase these Location Earth Dog Tags engraved with instructions on where to find Earth within the galaxy. The graphics are based on NASA's Pioneer 10 plaque which was intended to inform extraterrestrials about the spacecraft's origin. The language-free graphics feature the mathematical location of Earth in relation to several important pulsars (represented by the radial diagram) and Earth's location withing the solar system. The tags come with a complete money back guarantee should you ever be abducted and not safely returned to this, your home planet.

Bryan Christie Design

Bryan Christie Design specializes in scientific and architectural illustrations and diagrams. Their portfolio is very inspiring, especially the medical illustrations. You may recognize some of their work from recent covers of Wired or Business Week.

GOOD's Weights and Measures

I've recently become addicted to GOOD Magazine. One of the articles in their most recent issue looks at weights and measures. It features this astounding graphic depicting countries that have not adopted the metric system.

US Election Candidates on the Issues

When it comes to voting for one political party or another, one candidate or another, my opinion is this: Choose one or two issues that are important to you personally, and vote for the candidate/party who best represents your views on these issues. If you are a US citizen, 2decide.com has helped make your research quick and easy. They've created a chart showing each presidential candidate's view on the top issues. Check out the full chart here.

Anymails

Anymails is a fun and informative visualizer for your email inbox. It represents email using the natural metaphor of microbes. Different species of microbes represent email from different groups of people (i.e. Family, Job, Spam). The size and color of the microbes show the age of the email and the hairiness indicates the email's unread, read, or responded to status. Anymails was developed as the thesis project of Carolin Horn with coding by Florian Jenett. Great use of Flash and Processing ladies! (Found through Josh Spear).

Your Odds

Do you want to know your odds of dying - well they are 1 in 1 or 100%. Need more specific information - check out this chart created by National Geographic last year.

Diesel Holographic Fashion Show

Check out some of this video footage of Diesel's Spring/Summer 08 catwalk show last week. They used animated holograms to make underwater creatures and graphics swim the runway along with the models. It is a pretty amazing overall effect. For more information read this article on the Creative Review Blog.

C-Class Website

I found this website for the new Mercedes C-Class kind of interesting. They have come up with some keywords to describe the C-Class; energy, simplicity, balance, space, interaction, confidence. To get across the meaning of each of these concepts they have created little interactive activities to allow you to experience the meaning of each word for yourselves. For example the 'Interaction' demo asks you to navigate an invisible maze. The maze is just trial and error until the navigation assistance kicks in, then it is easy. These simple activities are a very effective way of getting across the key messages. (Found through FWA)

Musicrain

Musicrain is one of my favorite examples of a Flash based application. It is an interactive program that steps you through sheet music while playing the synchronized accompanying audio. You can specify the key, tempo and part volumes that the audio is played at. It is such a simple and effective use of Flash.

Photosynth

OoooOOo... I've just been playing with this demo of Photosynth. It's fun and amazing on so many different levels. The demo is a 3D reconstruction of St Mark's Square in Venice, made up of photos taken from Flikr. The photos are arranged based on their spacial relationships, creating a virtual model that can be rotated and zoomed. Graphics indicate where the picture was taken from and outline of other near by photos. This demo was released almost a year ago by Microsoft Live Labs and featured at this year's TED conference.

What is really amazing to me is how such large amounts of data can be so easily manipulated (accomplished partially by just focusing only on what is within the parameters of your screen). For more about the technology and it's uses check out this video. (Thanks Mike!)

Street View

Wow...Street View on Google Maps is really amazing. It is street level photos that you can rotate 360 degrees and zoom in and out to show what you would see if you were standing on that point in the map. So far it only exists for New York City, Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and San Francisco but hopefully this is just the beginning. This is one of the Google Map features that I've been waiting for, (although it wasn't quite as awesome in my head... it was more about photo reference shots for directions). If you haven't tried it out yet, go do it right now at maps.google.com and click on Street View.

Arc

Check out this new visualization tool by Digg Labs called Arc. It shows popular stories in arcs based on themes. It's not quite as effective at seeing the overall picture as Swarm or Stack are (see previous post) but it's very pretty to look at and I like that they keep exploring new ways to visualize ever changing and expanding data.

Moody

I was playing around today with an app called Moody by Crayon Room. It is an iTunes add on that allows you to tag songs based on emotional criteria. Songs are tagged using a colored grid to indicate how happy or sad, calm or intense your find them. Songs can then be played back using one, or multiple mood tags, essentially creating a mood specific playlist.

I like this idea because I do listen to different music depending on what mood I'm in, but I wish there was a more automated way to create the tags. I appreciate that adding the tags yourself makes them personalized (as in, a song that makes me happy could make another person sad), but I don't have time to tag all 2500 songs in my library. It would be better if songs were automatically tagged based on variables such as song speed, genera, etc, and then I could go back and adjust them later.

I was also really intrigued by the idea of using colors to represent moods, as opposed to smiley faces or some other method. It takes a little while to get your head around which colors represent which moods, but I think it works. (Thanks James!)

Amaznode

Looking for an interesting new way to search Amazon? Try Amaznode. It is a Flash based searching tool that visualizes Amazon's products based on matches to your keyword and information from Amazon's "customers who bought this item also bought" data.

Worldmapper

Worldmapper is an interesting website that contains 366 maps that visualize different global stats. The maps use equal area cartograms that re-sizes each country according to a variable. For example, the above map shows Research and Development Expenditure. The country size is shown in proportion to the worldwide research and development spending. These types of maps are very good at quickly illustrating statistics and their popularity seems to be growing.

Mammal Supertree

The Mammal Supertree is the most complete family tree of mammals to date. Based on fossil data and genetic analyses, a team of scientist mapped mammal groups back to one original ancestor. The data itself is very interesting but it was the organization of the information that really caught my eye. This isn't your usual family tree top down style chart. The data is arranged in a circle with time expanding from the center of the circle outwards. This seems like a much more natural way of arranging a family tree data because it grows outward in all directions instead of just one. (Found through Visual Complexity)

Personal Pies

I can't imagine anything to stress you out about aging better than seeing your life in pie charts. This brilliant pie chart bio was created by Craig Robinson of Filp Flop Flyin'. Other topics of his life charts include percentage of life with a beard, percentage of EU nations visited, and percentage of neighbors I've been friends with. Sigh... one more good reason for me to reconsider my aversion to charts and graphs. (Found through Information Aesthetics)

The Shape of Song

This website visualizes the shape of songs by creating diagrams based on repeating musical elements. Translucent arches link identical passages. Longer passages create thicker arches. This method of diagramming allows you to easily see the overall structure and composition of a song and compare it to others.

The above image illustrates the shape of Norwegian Wood by the Beatles.

10 x 10

10 x 10 is a website that aims to create a unique view of our time by collecting 100 highly used words and their corresponding images every hour, day, month and year. The content is gathered from a few news sources and sorted automatically with no human intervention.

This is a pretty interesting idea. It creates an illustrative historical record that is more about observation than interpretation. This site won a Flash Forward award a couple of years ago for its technical merit. (Thanks Heckman).

Sunset Time Graphs

Jim Bumgardner (a.k.a. jbum) has put together some pretty intriguing time graphs using photos from Flicker. Over one year he collected 15000 photos posted to Flickr with the tag Sunset. He then used the image's EXIF data to tell when the photo was taken and graph the photos accordingly. The horizontal axis represents the days of the year and the vertical access shows the time of day. The photos are dimmed to reflect the number of images posted at that time. The overall effect is a graph that shows the sun's cycle over the seasons. He also calls attention to the echo of sunset photographs taken between 5-7am caused by all the people who have their cameras am and pm settings backwards.

Check out this and more fascinating graphs by Jim on his flickr account.

Digg Labs

If you are not familiar with Digg.com it is a website where users submit links to stories, videos or podcasts that they find interesting and then other users "digg" the submitted stories. The stories are ranked according to how many diggs they get. It's an interesting site, and if you haven't been there you really should check it out.

My favorite part of Digg is the Digg Labs where you can view the stories as Swarms or Stacks. They are both visual representations of stories being submitted and dugg in real time. In Swarm, stories are represented as circles. You can see Digg users swarming around the stories and watch them grow as their popularity increases. In the Stacks view stories are shown as columns and diggs fall from above. The columns change color to represent the number of diggs they have received.

State of the Union

This is an interesting look at the relationship between language and politics. It's an interface that maps prominent words in American State of the Union addresses from 1790-2007. The keywords from each speech are mapped based on their position within the speech and their frequency of use. Using the timeline you can scroll back and forth between the addresses. This creates a pretty interesting glimpse of US history. The words range from Colonies to Globalization, from Indians to Iraqis, and from Freedom to Terror. Explore it for yourself here.

Indexed

I'm fascinated by Jessica Hagy's blog called Indexed. She creates charts and graphs to, as she says, make fun of some things and sense of others. Each graph tells a story, much the same way an editorial cartoon in a newspaper does. This are making me rethink my negative attitudes towards graphs and charts! (Thanks Katy)

The Darfur Wall

The Darfur Wall is a unique approach to raising money and awareness for a noteworthy cause. It is a virtual wall made up of the numbers 1 to 400 000, each number representing a person killed in Darfur. By donating one dollar you light up a number of your choice. As the numbers turn from gray to white, the panels of the wall start to glow. You can zoom out and animate the donations over time so watch the wall being built. Simple and very effective! Check it out at www.darfurwall.org

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Thinkmap has created a Visual Thesaurus where the suggested words are grouped together by meaning. This visual spin on language is very effective. Try it out on their website