Beautiful Info-Graphics From 1870
Posted on June 4th, 2010 at 7:37 pm by Steve

You wouldn’t expect to find such beauty in the Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Ninth Census (1870) from the Library of Congress, would you? Sophisticated data visualizations, hand-calculated and hand-engraved, in beautiful colors, prepared by a staff headed by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintedent of the ninth census.

The display above shows you, for each U. S. state and territory, the proportion of the church-going population (the colored boxes) relative to the total population (the shaded box in which the colored boxes are set), as well as the breakdown by the top 11 denominations!

I highly recommend that you check out all the charts and maps!

AR Kitchen (Now with 500% more ads!)
Posted on February 10th, 2010 at 3:11 pm by dr.hoo

An amazing/creepy visualization of what life might be like when we are “jacked in” to a virtual overlay 24/7. Lots of great little details in the animation. Note the sea of advertising that can be controlled, paying you more money per second depending on your environmental saturation.

The future looks AWESOME!

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

Crayola’s Law
Posted on January 19th, 2010 at 8:57 pm by Steve

The chart above is a lovely info-graphic showing the introduction of colors into the Crayola crayon box over time. The creator of the chart derived from the data Crayola’s Law: the number of crayon colors doubles every 28 years.

Damn It’s Cold!
Posted on December 30th, 2009 at 2:37 pm by Steve

The image above is the daily trace of data from the weather station atop the Green Building at MIT (pictured below). The top box shows you the temperature, which dropped from 32°F to 10°F in 24 hours… the second box shows the steadily rising barometric pressure… the third box shows the wind speeds with gusts above 60 MPH and sustained wind speeds well above 40 MPH – the Green Building is about 300 feet tall, so it’s well above any obstructions and hence records higher wind speeds than ground stations.

All of which is to say… Damn it’s cold!

Graphic Design Awesomeness
Posted on November 12th, 2009 at 11:59 pm by Steve

File this one under “E” for “EPIC WIN”! Cameron Booth created this idealized map of the United States Interstate Highway System, after the style of H. C. Beck’s original London Underground maps.

Left vs. Right – Which one am I again?
Posted on November 3rd, 2009 at 9:38 pm by dr.hoo

Left vs. Right

Thank god for complicated diagrams! Now I understand everything.

The background.

Missions to Mars
Posted on October 20th, 2009 at 1:56 pm by Steve

A beautiful infographic by Bryan Christie Design graces the the IEEE Spectrum special report, Why Mars? Why Now?:

This. Is. AWESOME.
Posted on September 29th, 2009 at 6:14 pm by Steve

Serge Brunier has created an incredible 360-degree panorama he calls “The Sky of the Earth:”

The images were collected from two exceptional astronomical sites, the Atacama Desert in the southern hemisphere and the Caldeira de Taburiente in the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere.

It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — its constellations, its thousands year old stars, whose names have nourished all childhoods, its myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera.

You have to check this out.

SF Crimespotting Is Now Live
Posted on August 20th, 2009 at 11:36 am by Steve

I’m a huge fan of Stamen Design out of San Francisco. One of the things they excel at is data-driven map presentations. And SF Crimespotting (pictured above) is a terrific example thereof!

I do a lot of map-based presentation, and I’ve leaned heavily on their work in the past (particularly their open-source project ModestMaps).

For those of you in the East Bay, you might also check out their original work in this genre, Oakland Crimespotting.

Stay safe!

Beautiful Artwork
Posted on August 10th, 2009 at 2:25 pm by Steve

Enjoy the artwork of Mark Weaver.

Enjoy the beautiful design and music at ISO50.

Enjoy the generative art of Robert Hodgin at Flight 404.

Enjoy the inspirations and artwork of James White at Signalnoise.com, who compiled this collection of design inspirations from the 70’s and 80’s:

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