John Nack on Adobe

June 19, 2008

Infographic stylings: From bacon to Ludacris

• Love bacon, love the bacon flowchart.  "Are you wearing pants?"  (Evidently this will prove important.)
• Men's Vogue celebrates Massimo Vignelli's sleek 1972 New York subway map.
• The Boston Globe teaches you to nap. [Via]
• Stefanie Gray maps the area codes in which Ludacris claims to... uh, know ladies.  [Via]
• Mark Rabinowitz uses the graphical language of nutrition facts to illustrate some truths about prostitution.
• How many employees does Google have?  About this many.  [Via]
• It's tangentially related, maybe, but I dig these out-of-context small boat images. [Via]

June 10, 2008

Infographic goodness

The NYT has been kicking out the good infographic jams lately:

• Andrew Kuo created a funny, handsome infographic on why music festivals are worth skipping.  For more from Andrew, see his blog + previous.
• Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox have created an interesting Flash-based infographic that totes up "All of Inflation’s Little Parts."  I often find presentations like this dense, impenetrable, and/or over-designed, but this one's an exception.  [Via]
• Adobe XD guy Ethan Eismann points out a couple of video-based info presentations. In one of them, interactive voting is tied in with the content.

Elsewhere:

• Ben Terrett pulls together lots of interesting visualizations. [Via]

• Rorschach Economics: Japan's Phillips Curve looks like Japan; cigarette consumption looks like Virginia.
• It's been around a while, but I still dig Michal Migurski's flashy newsmap

March 10, 2008

From D&D to decapitations, in infographics & maps

• Sam Potts has created a hilarious infographic for Sunday's NY Times, part of their sendoff for D&D creator Gary Gygax.
• The NYT has been posting other interesting graphics lately, including How Americans Spend Their Money and the Flash-enabled Ebb & Flow of Movies.
• In Rudimentum Novitiorum, Bibliodyssey surveys maps & other infographics of antiquity.
• With a more modern spin, Colourlovers talks about the use of color in transit maps, offering a number of cool examples.
• How about a world map made from musical notes? [Via]
• What does an hour's worth of movement in front of the TV look like?  One Flickr user endeavored to find out, using a video camera & a grid of masking tape to plot the positions of dad, kids, and cat. [Via]
• For the greater good:
  • Easier voting through graphic design: Marcia Lausen is "determined to apply the highest possible standards of information design to make [voting systems] clear, accessible, easy to use and the results accurate." [Via]
  • John Emerson's Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design offers a guide for NGOs, non-profits and advocacy groups. [Via]
• If you can't go another day without knowing how to stage a realistic decapitation, well, consult these graphics.
  

February 24, 2008

Naked saunas, 3D Flash globes, and other infographic goodness

• My wife and I are nervously quizzing each other on these expert (and very funny) baby care instructions (boosted wholesale, it would seem, from David Sopp's Safe Baby Handling Tips). [Via]
• Wable is "a coffee table that displays a user's web activity via physical bar graphing."  Yes, I remember pining for such a thing not ever. (Are Venn-diagram kiddie pools next?)
• Maps:
  • Concentric circles are coming for us!!  The Onion has fun with news infographics.
  • Seeking to place events into geographical context, Yahoo has created a 3D NewsGlobe using Adobe Flex.  ComputerWorld's got background on the project. [Via]
  • In similar vein of "Learning America Smarter," check out the naked saunas, black metal, and ass-beating of Scandinavia. (And you thought it was all chilling out with MDF.)  [Via]
  • The Gough Map is said to be the oldest accurate map of Britain, dating from around 1360.
• Signage:
  • My little brother Ted let me ride along last month as he drove his garbage truck.  This safeyman image (somewhat dodgy iPhone-cam quality, sorry) I snapped in his cab shows the truck really putting the "screw" back in "screw of Archimedes."
  • "Do not iron while wearing shirt (on an iron-on decal)": more good advice from the safetyman chronicles. [Via]
  • I can get behind this "Faith healing sign" at Disneyland, not to mention Serbian children escaping a triangle.[Via]
• Blogging software has made self-publishing seem simple, but beneath the covers, a whole lot's going on.  Wired has a Flash-based diagram showing what all happens when one hits "Publish." [Via]

February 15, 2008

Fun & clever recent infographics

I'm endlessly fascinated with how people display information visually.  Here are some cool recent examples:

• JamPhat features a hilarious (and huge!) collection of hip hop-inspired infographics.  Images are helpfully linked to YouTube vids of the related songs. It was a good day...
• Fun with Venn diagrams: I love the simplicity of this clever music elitism t-shirt. (Compare to Wu-Tang Clan.) [Via]
• What if we regarded flags as info visualizations?  That's what Brazilian designer Icaro Doria did for the magazine Grande Reportagem.  [Via]
• Call it "Most Inscrutable. Karaoke Interface. Ever."  Or just call it pretty.  Robert from Flight404 (see previous) has used Processing to create the lovely video Solar, incorporating lyrics from Goldfrapp. [Via]
• HistoryShots sells prints of really cool infographics. 
• ArmsFlow presents global arms transactions, visualized in an interactive map.  Clicking individual countries shows their import/export flow for a given year.  Interesting concept, but the lines overlap so densely that it's hard to see what's happening.  I'd love to see the whole thing taken further.  [Via]
• Knowing things Biblically:
  • Chris Harrison pours ancient texts through graphical filters in his Visualizing the Bible project. [Via]
  • In the early 20th century Clarence Larkin turned his scriptural knowledge into Biblical infographics. [Via]
• Virtual China features a Chinese diagram on how to cook chicken with beer.  [Via]
  

October 29, 2007

Hipsters, gangstas, & unacceptable haircuts

Chart! And! Graphs!

• Maps
  • "As a resident of Manhattan and an owner of a complete set of bodily organs, [Jack Anderson] knows a thing or two about subway maps and anatomy. Now you do, too."  Check out his Illustrator-designed digestive-system-as-subway-map t-shirt. [Update: See also the Metropolitan Cardiac Authority.] [Via]
  • Online comic xkcd offers a map of online communities.  (It somehow makes me think of a Hobbit map that spent years stuck to my childhood bedroom ceiling.)
  • This Virgin Atlantic map drives home the vast number of movies available for viewing in flight.
  • I love the incredible intricacy of Christa Dichgans's maps. [Via]
• Graphs
  • Artist Andrew Kuo spent the summer hitting as many NY concerts as possible, and he "obsessively charted the entire experience, from reviewing the bands to counting the number of porta-potties." Check out the results.  See also the brief accompanying article.  Many more infographics live on his blog.
  • Protec' ya neck: Chris Sims lets us peer into the rigorous science of gangsta rap. [Via]
  • This Australian dating ad uses infographics to make its pitch.  (Only 11% of suitors have "unacceptable haircuts"?  They must not be counting the vast number of Aussie dudes with fauxhawks.)
    

July 21, 2007

Cool new infographics

• The Internets, it's well known, are a series of tubes. That reality is now depicted in this info graphic from Information Architects Japan, mashing up online players with a map of the Tokyo subway system.  Nice to see Adobe occupying what seems to be some sunny downtown space ("They continue to move towards the center of gravity without being too loud about it").  More info on the project is here. [Via]
• Edward Tufte celebrates the NYT infographics of Megan Jagerman in a detailed profile on his site. [Via]  Speaking of work done in the paper, this week they posted a cool Flash-based map of The Wealthiest Americans Ever, efficiently plotting net worth, rank, and life span.
• CraigStatsSF combines data from Craigslist with Google Maps in order to produce heat maps that depict housing cost and density by region.  (Disclaimer: "We only identify with hotpockets which are tasty and lethal.") [Via]
• I don't know whether it's an infographic per se, and it's hardly new, but Henrich Bunting's 16th-century depiction of the world as a cloverleaf (joined at Jerusalem) is interesting enough to deserve mention. [Via]
  
• Free Press features a visual representation of how AT&T has been reconstituted, T2-style, after being broken up in 1984. Somehow I keep hearing Johnny Rotten saying, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" [Via]
• Update: Greg Dizzia has posted a chart that graphically depicts the details of every relationship he's ever had. (Note: The chart is work-safe, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea.) [Via]

April 27, 2007

Adventures in Infographics

I'm intrigued by work that strives to make sense of large, complicated sets of data (see previous).  Along those lines:

• This London-style NYC subway map is generating a lot of conversation, both online & inside Adobe.  Weird, I remember discussing this exact topic when I first started at an NY Web shop--nine years ago!  Bridge engineering manager Arno Gourdol points out Mr. Beck's Underground Map, a thorough account of the Tube map design.  And from there I found this page, brimming with more resources on the subject. [Via]
• PingMag chats with Andrew Vande Moere, creator of the Infosthetics blog, about the beauty of data visualization.  Both links are chock full of loveliness.  (Bonus: No Edward Tufte w/young white-gloved flunkies.)
• The Strange Maps blog depicts right- vs. left-hand driving around the globe, while providing the interesting back story of how these conventions came to be. [Via]
• Covering 5000 years in 90 seconds, Maps of War shows the tides of conquest that have swept through the Middle East. [Via]
• The US government gets into the game, using census data to drive home the aging of the populace.
• I dig illustrator Christoph Niemann's witty little visual comparison of some pieces of music.  (I'm a Jaws-level pianist at best.)
• Pentagram designer Paula Scher created this anatomy of a blog conversation for the NYT. Ahh, the descent into ennui... [Via]
• At FITC last weekend I really enjoyed meeting Evan Roth, the dude behind the SkyMall demographic visualization, laser graffiti, and much more. Though I'm coming up short on links to it, he's created a method of visualizing one's daily clicks: wiring up two USB cables from a single mouse, plugging one into a main work computer, and plugging the other into a machine running Photoshop or other graphics app.  As you click around email, the Web, etc., you produce a drawing (of sorts) on the other machine, with paint blobs mapped to the same coordinates as your clicks.  (It sounds like AttenTV might be doing vaguely similar, for profit.)  Oh, and bringing this post full circle, Evan's crew at Eyebeam has created an interactive NYC subway map.