Good article by Steve Silberman on the woman behind Apple’s first icons, including some great concept sketches. (Via)
Jim Valandingham animates the racial divide in cities using census data of their black and white populations. (Via)
I went to the Talk To Me exhibit at MoMA this past weekend and I highly recommend it. There are too many great pieces to link, but one that’s viewable online is a project cataloging different animal sounds made by children around the world. They are surprisingly different, but mostly all recognizable. They’re also absurdly cute.
jmak:
Thanks, Steve.
Posting designs like this one makes me paranoid, because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not original. I enjoyed the process regardless, but please let me know if somebody else beat me to the idea!
Thoughts?
These minimalist posters by Christian Jackson each represent a familiar children’s story. (from Papertastebuds, via @rosegarsch)
Nathan Yau of Flowing Data remixes this New York Times interactive graphic about how americans spend their day. His version breaks up the activity categories so they can be compared side-by-side. The original survey data can be found here.
In his new book, Ursus Wehrli takes the disorder of everyday life and organizes it. (Via Kottke)
Entry for a competition to rethink the food label. My main gripe with the current label design is that it assumes you will remember the percentages of nutrients you eat throughout an entire day. This design attempts to show percentages per meal (with three meals a day) to make a food’s value more clear. To demonstrate, which value seems like a healthier percentage of calories: 40% daily value or 120% meal value? They are the same, but 40% daily value doesn’t seem as that bad. Other entries in this competition can be seen here.
Due to some domain issues, I’ll need to relink many of the images on this site. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Update: Everything should be squared away now.
A good illustration and article in the New York Times addressing the variation in women’s dress sizes (via Flowing Data).
This is my attempt at a radiation dosage chart in response to a couple others that have been posted recently.
Randall Munroe of XKCD posted the widely circulated chart below. In it, the relationships within each section are very clear: you can easily see how eating a banana compares to a cross-country flight (two blue boxes vs. 320 blue boxes). However, in order to compare eating a banana to severe radiation poisoning, that relationship isn’t as direct. You must follow the size conversions from blue boxes to green boxes to red boxes since there is no immediate relationship.
(click to enlarge)
David McCandless of Information is Beautiful also created a radiation dosage chart, shown below. Visually it is easier to navigate, as it lists each dosage vertically in sequence. The tradeoff here is that there isn’t an accurate visual relationship between the numbers. There is as much space between .4 microsieverts to 1 microsievert as there is between 50 millisieverts to 100 millisieverts. The color shifts also vary in their relationship to dosage. In the space of .9 microsieverts, the color shifts from yellow to green. A similar shift in color from blue to purple though, spans 90 millisieverts.
(click to enlarge)
In my version (top), the goal was to show a clear relationship between the smallest and largest dosage. In order for that chart to fit on one screen/page, I needed to visualize doses using volume. I also aimed to make the color relationships consistent. To do this I used a gradient from yellow to red and plotted all the points from zero to 8,000 millisieverts. As a result, there is minimal color shift between the smaller doses, and significant jumps between the larger ones. I had to make tradeoffs as well. It was a struggle to find a size that kept all the doses at least somewhat visible while aiming to fit the whole image (or most of it) on one large screen. This affected how the captions were displayed and how many dosage examples I could show.
Notes: All my data was aggregated from David and Randall’s charts, with the addition of the TSA blog. Keep in mind there is some controversy (via DF) about the backscatter emission tests.
Arthur Buxton’s beautiful piece shows Vincent van Gogh paintings as pie charts based on the most prominent colors used in them. (Via Flowing Data)
Alexander Chen animates New York City’s subway system as if it’s a string ensemble. (Via Kottke)
This graphic created by Dehahs, a member at Deviantart, tracks all the deaths that Dexter is responsible for. There are obviously spoilers in this chart, so if you haven’t seen the show and plan to, then don’t click the image. (Via Flowing Data)
