information aesthetics

The Economist Videographics: Presidential Race in Narrated Data Graphics

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:54:03 +0100

The discussion about the need to make a distinction between data visualization and data art has recently resurfaced in various various online locations.

Now it seems we might have to rehash this discussion also for the practice of animated infographics. Since quite some time, The Economist has semi-regularly been featuring a new sort of information display, which they coin as "videographics". For instance, in their latest installment titled America's Presidential Race [economist.com] one can experience quite relatively sophisticated data graphics, charts and diagrams, instead of the usual flashy animated typographic and iconographic effects for this kind of practice. Here, the presentation is further augmented with animations and a narration.

Other installments include an explanation of the French elections, or a detailed analysis of the state of the nation.

You can also watch the animation below.

The Power of Networks: Manuel Lima's Talk... Sketched and Animated

Wed, 23 May 2012 21:11:43 +0100

Manuel Lima, currently senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing but maybe best known from the (now sparsely updated) blog Visual Complexity and his recent book with the same title, like to discuss the power of network visualisation in a wide and conceptually rich manner.

You now have to chance to experience his 11-minute talk online, but instead of seeing Manuel talk in front of his slides, the following presentation solely consists of a large set of sketched illustrations which represent and visually clarify the most important concepts that he discussed.

Watch either the animated or traditional version at YouTube.

The animated versions of well-known talks is brought by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

ThreadWatch: Tracking and Visualizing the Use of Software Applications

Wed, 23 May 2012 20:31:11 +0100

ThreadWatch [finekost.com] by interactive developer Alex Milde visualizes the usage of software programs on the Mac platform over the timeframe of one day.

First, one needs to download a small program that tracks all active applications on your desktop, as well as their impact in terms of memory and CPU usage. This tracked data is stored in a text file, which can be uploaded and then visualized. The data is not stored nor kept by the visualization tool. Individual software programs are represented by different colors.

The Voting Patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest in the last 10 Years

Tue, 22 May 2012 15:26:56 +0100

In less than a week, more than 125 million people will be watching the 2012 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual competition held among active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

An important part of the televised contest is the whole voting process, during which each participating country makes their favorites votes public in about 3 different languages.

For those nerdy people who like to know what country voted when in some particular way, there is now the following information graphic. Eurovizion [site50.net], designed by graphic designer Ben Willers, provides a detailed overview of all voting patterns that occurred during the last 10 years of Eurovision Song Contests.

The top bar graph shows the votes received by each country. The bottom, dot-plot kind of graph reveals all individual votes, where the horizontal axis denotes the 'giving' countries, and the vertical axis the 'receiving' ones.

One can detect some remarkable anomalies that show how the perceived quality of musical songs is quite a cultural affair. Or how can one explain the relationships between Greece and Cyprus (or Albania), and Germany and Israel?

Hans Rosling's Shortest Talk Ever

Mon, 21 May 2012 21:29:25 +0100

One does not require flashy Powerpoint slides or state exact statistical numbers to be able to convey an educational yet compelling presentation. Nor should the presentation need to take that long.

Hans Rosling, who is already known to use physical props during his presentations, ranging from IKEA storage boxes, over washing machines to a real sword, demonstrates again how physical objects can be used to focus human attention to important statistical trends. He also shows how stones can convincingly form bar graphs.

The following 'talk', taking less than 50 seconds, 'happened' during a spontaneous interview after the TEDxSummit 2012 in Doha, Qatar and discusses the impact of global population growth.

Watch the presentation below. The presentation also reminds me to always show up with clean shoes.

Venngage: And Yet Another Online Infographics Editor

Tue, 15 May 2012 22:11:48 +0100

After 2 very similar posts in a very small timeframe, featuring Easel.ly and infogr.am respectively, I seem not to be able to follow the 'automatic infographics editing' scene fast enough.

Automatic resume infographics creator visualize.me has just launched Venngage [venngage.com], which aims to empower people to create beautiful infographics in minutes, so that "creating infographics [becomes] as easy as creating a Powerpoint presentation".

As a unique feature, Venngage's visual elements are displayed as pure HTML elements, which should positively influence SEO stats, page ranks and back links.

As with infogr.am, venngage is able to directly link custom data values to data-driven graphs, but offers more visualization techniques that go beyond the traditional pie chart, line graph and bar chart, and includes sophisticated techniques such as treemaps, bubble charts, word clouds, and the like. As with the other services, venngage offers the ability to combine a specific visual style with a range of configurable visualization techniques, along various editing features that range from color choices, labels and font types.

The resulting infographic can be embedded (see rough example below), downloaded as an image, or linked to.

infogr.am: Another Online Editor of Interactive Infographics

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:28:35 +0100

A few days ago, we posted the website Easel.ly, a new web-based service that aims to empower lay users to design infographic-like illustrations within the browser. Unfortunately, Easel.ly seems more apt in combining infographic-like images on a canvas, than to link real numerical data to a graphical form.

So here comes Infogr.am [infogr.am], another competitor towards semi-automatic, web-based infographics editing. Developed by a start-up based in Riga (Latvia), though now based in London, the online service offers a collection of infographic themes as well as different interactive chart types (e.g. bar graph, line chart, pie chart, matrix chart, and so on). Note that next to the basic visual style, they also offer some more 'humorist' approaches (such mapping the tongue of a frog as a horizontal bar). Users, which should include journalists, bloggers, data professionals, education, financial experts and designers, can then customize their infographic by adding multiple charts underneath each other, and configure them with their own personal data.

User-generated charts can then be embedded in third-party websites (see example below) or be linked to by dedicated URLs.

So will there be a time where all infographics will look really alike?

The Historical Evolution of Europe's Borders

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:36:05 +0100

The movie "Epic time-lapse map of Europe" fast forwards a map from the year 1000 AD until 2003 to reveal the dynamic nature of Europe's borders, alliances, unions, territories, and occupied lands.

An alternative movie takes a bit longer, but contains useful textual annotations such as the actual year that is shown and the events that occurred.

The movie was made with "Centennia Historical Atlas" by Centennia Software.

Watch the movies below.

Via @tillnm.

FatFonts: New Font Links Value of a Number to Amount of Pixels Shown

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:47:29 +0100

FatFonts [fatfonts.org] is a novel numeric typeface for data visualization purposes. The design of FatFonts is based on Arabic numerals, but the amount of ink (i.e. dark pixels) used for each digit is proportional to its quantitative value. This font enables the reading of numerical data while still preserving an overall visual context.

The typeface was developed by Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale at the University of Calgary. In the online gallery several case studies are documented on how this font can be used for good used. More detailed information about these examples can be found in their academic paper (PDF), while more interactive examples can be viewed here.

The fonts themselves can be downloaded here.

Via @eagereyes.

Easel.ly Debutes Online Editor of Infographics

Thu, 10 May 2012 20:02:33 +0100

San Diego-based start-up Easel.ly [easel.ly] is offering a beta service that allows lay people to design and implement their own "infographics" via an online editor. The user-based customization of infographics seems to be the next phase after the automatic generation of infographics, and has already been promised by community websites like visual.ly.

For now, easel.ly allows users to drag and drop predefined and uploaded vector images on pre-designed canvases and themes for easy creation and customization of infographics. According to the founders Patrick Alcoke and Neil Harris, all themes have been designed by graphic designers to ensure the highest quality for their users to start with.

The service is currently still in beta and thus free. The editor also resembles more an online vector shape canvas with a library of flashy infographic imagery, than a workable tool that makes the mapping of numerical values to believable shapes more efficient or compelling. Yet, we'll need to see what the future brings.

The Iranian Internet Repression Expressed in Infographics

Wed, 09 May 2012 22:15:13 +0100

The series of infographics titled "The Iranian Internet" [this-is-maral.com] by master student Maral Pourkazemi combines an aesthetic sense of (greyscale) infographics with the serious topic of international politics.

Maral designed six different content panels that each explain a distinct theme, such as Iran's general Internet usage, their concept of a "Halal" or "national" Internet, how Iranian users can escape this "Halal" Internet, which Iranian blogs are filtered, how the cyber repression operates, and how this is initiated by the paradox system of government.

More detailed information is available here (German).

List of Hand-Picked and Recommended Data Visualization Tools

Mon, 07 May 2012 21:20:35 +0100

The following post seems particularly useful for people that are relatively new in the field of data visualization and might consider developing their own graphs or interactive applications. Should you program or not? What tools should currently exist? What visualization frameworks are available?

The good people of the Swiss website called datavisualisation present "A Carefully Selected List of Recommended Tools" [datavisualization.ch], containing a set of hand-picked software libraries, applications and services that they use regularly for their own infovis work. The current collection contains three different categories: libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data, and will be updated regularly. A filter in the right top corner allows to exclude those tools that require programming expertise.

More detailed information is available here.

C&A Fashion Like: Real-Time Facebook 'Likes' Shown on Clothing Racks

Mon, 07 May 2012 20:17:38 +0100

The Brazilian arm of international fashion retailer C&A has launched a custom-made clothes rack [facebook.com] that shows in real-time how many Facebook "Likes" a particular clothing item received on Facebook. Accordingly, customers present in the physical store can better estimate how popular a specific clothing item is perceived by the masses through the smart use of social media crowdsourcing.

In practice, the project blends the border between the virtual and the physical by counting the "Likes" on small digital displays that are integrated in the clothing hangers. Now one should only avoid to indadvertedly swap the fashion pieces around, of course.

Via @vizify and The Verge.

Müsli Ingredient Network: How Germans like to Eat their Breakfast

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:35:57 +0100

Müsli Ingredient Network [stefaner.eu] is a graphic meant for the print medium that shows how the customers of the German start-up MyMuesli tend to combine different müsli ingredients together.

Although one of the smaller projects designed by "truth and beauty operator" Moritz Stefaner, it still offers a small set of information graphics, such as a straight-forward radial network visualization, in which the ingredients are grouped by category, such as base mueslis, fruit, nuts, sweets, and so on. An additional "surprise factor" matrix visualization provides a more helpful view in revealing the links between the ingredients. Here, the circles represent link strengths between pairs of ingredients, while the saturation and darkness of a circle indicates the "unexpectedness" of that respective link strength.

Some of the insights discovered include how fruit is the most popular ingredient, and how different fruits are often combined with each other. Sweets and nuts, however, are rarely combined. Most people pick not more than a single sweet ingredient, while the link between pineapple and papaya seems stronger correlated than pineapple and mango.

High Resolution Movie Reveals the Infrastructure of Humans on Earth

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:51:03 +0100

The following movie amazes for its beautiful and high-definition rendition of the presence of human presence on the scale of a whole planet.

The movie "Welcome to the Anthropocene" [vimeo.com] developed by global education organization Globaia reveals the start of a new geological era dominated by humans, by visualizing its main infrastructure, such as cities, roads, railways, transmissions lines and underwater cables.

Those who are interested in static maps rather than an animated movie of the Earth, can check out the according collection here.

The film is part of an educational webportal on the Anthropocene, commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, and developed and sponsored by Anthropocene.