paper & pencil

Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com Interactives

Very inspiring article on UIE -Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com Interactives. Really great ideas for creating visualizations of data to tell a story.

headline styles

From the design desk at Poynter Online - Today's Headline Styles. The article talks about different types of headline styles and when to use them with a visual comparison of the different treatments using "Waves of Death" from the recent tsunami coverage.

Links to other Poynter articles on headlines:

• Headlines: Bigger is Better
• Center This Headline?
• Hierarchy Within Headlines: Layers of Storytelling

(via drew)

A subway map of cancer pathways

Cancer arises from the stepwise accumulation of genetic changes that confer upon an incipient neoplastic cell the properties of unlimited, self-sufficient growth and resistance to normal homeostatic regulatory mechanisms. Advances in human genetics and molecular and cellular biology have identified a collection of cell phenotypes — the main destinations in the subway map below — that are required for malignant transformation1. Specific molecular pathways (subway lines) are responsible for programming these behaviours. Although the connections between cancer-cell wiring and function remain incompletely explored and specified — hence the many lines under construction — the broad outlines of the molecular circuitry of the cancer cell can now be sketched. Further advances in understanding these pathways and their interconnections will accelerate the development of molecularly targeted therapies that promise to change the practice of oncology.

(via informationdesign.org)

worst jobs in science

recent article in Popular Science details the worst jobs in science. The icons used to classify job types are fantastic.

(via Info-D-Cafe)

sparklines

chapter 18 of edward tufte's upcoming book Beautiful Evidence (2005) is available online - Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-like Graphics

blog maps

infovis has posted visualizations of the blogging world.

there are city maps with locations of bloggers at major stations:

London

New York

Washington

(via infodesign)

dynamap

a company called Urban Mapping has created a 2-D map where different views can be seen based on titlting the map in different directions.

see the Flash demo

(courtesy of listera on sigia-l)

history flow

via infodesign:

project from IBM's Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group called History Flow attempts to visually represent the contributions and evolutions of online collaboration.

history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text's evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?

Wikipedia page on "evolution"; each color represents the contribution of a partibular registered author. White and gray represent the contributions of anonymous authors.

the site shows results from analyzing Wikipedia on such aspects of vandalism, author contributions, activity over time, and persistence of contributions.

simplicity vs. clarity

david l. goines has written a nice article on tufte's Envisioning informaition called To Clarify, Add Detail.

following WW1 the Bahaus movement was a response to a need for order and the author's take on that was:

In graphics as in politics there was an attempt to impose order on systems that are essentially disorderly. Often complex systems are made to appear simple and orderly by paring away elements of the truth. False order is the result of false simplicity.

Severe and idealistic, the Bauhaus gave birth to a humorless, sterile child -- the Swiss style of graphic design. As a result of its pervasive internationalism, we have come to accept pared-down representations of almost everything.

In fact, far from enhancing, this minimalist design style impedes communication at almost every level. Unless you have already been told what a particular graphic is supposed to mean, you will have little luck in figuring out what to do when you see one. Less, my friends, is often only less.

Charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, guides, instructions, directories and maps should not look as though they were conveying a single gulp of information as simplistically as possible. The designer should enhance the dimensionality and density of portrayals of information by increasing data.

"Standards of excellence for information design are set by high quality maps, with diverse, bountiful detail, several layers of close reading combined with an overview, and rigorous data. . . . Often the less complex and less subtle the line, the more ambiguous and less interesting is the reading." - Edward Tufte

tufte - thumbs up or down?

jessica helfand wrote a very contentious piece on tufte (and david byrne too!) and the discussion that follows is very heated. lots of very good points throughout:
The Dispassionate Statistician

some interesting items in the article:

Both Byrne and Tufte are self-proclaimed experts. Yet in spite of what they might have you believe, neither are artists -- in that formally attuned, conceptually rigorous way, for instance, that one might look at Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol: and here I am deliberately citing artists whose work embraces some aspect of popular culture yet manages, at the same time, to move beyond it in a meaningful, and indeed, memorable way.

He is a statistician by training, a designer by marriage, and a sociologist by default –- giving names to stuff we already know, and getting paid handsomely for it along the way.

and from the comments:

Tufte is not a designer he's actually a fan who has capitalized on the wits of some really good, if not great, visual thinkers (his wife Inge Druckery included). No, I can't fault him for being entrepreneurial. But like most good curators he should properly acknowledge all of the designers who've helped him achieve so much over the years. Unfortunately in the often inequitable collaborations between author and designer, the contributions of the designer are still transparent.

I was careful in my previous post not to use the word ‘simple.’ I think it is a great word (despite Ikea’s best efforts to co-opt it) but not in the same league as ‘clear.’ Information design often has to be both complex and clear. Again, Tufte is very insightful about this in other people’s work.

The danger for me is that his version of information design (or Richard Saul Wurman’s or Nigel Holmes’) becomes too simple when applied universally. In fact by the third book it becomes a style.

In dialogues like this, I love bringing out this old warhorse: All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that. -Terry Eagleton

As Dmitri wrote, “simple” and “clear” are not the same. Tufte spends considerable space in his later books (and in The cognitive style of PowerPoint) despairing at the useless simplicity of many modern graphics. On p. 37 of Envisioning information he even says “To clarify, add detail”.