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)
A good illustration and article in the New York Times addressing the variation in women’s dress sizes (via Flowing Data).
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)
The New York Times has a piece about this map from 1860. It’s the last visual record showing slavery from census data. (Via Flowing Data)
Last night I went to a lecture by Carl E. Schoonover at Observatory. His new book has some breathtaking visualizations of the brain. The talk was great too if you get a chance to see it.
Knowing my obsession with charts, a friend recently brought to my attention that Jennifer Egan’s novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, contains a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. If you’re like me, you’ll have flashes of Edward Tufte’s condemnation and be skeptical of how this could work, but it does.
The presentation is from the point of view of a 12-year old girl in the near future, who uses the program as her journal. You can click above to experience the whole chapter, but there is some audio, so mind your volume level. The speed of the slides may be too fast, so I recommend pausing and advancing at your own pace.
I love that Jennifer Egan uses all the deficiencies of PowerPoint and the aesthetic of amateurish charting to advance the story. The young girl, Allison, seems to chart fragments of observations and dialogue in an attempt to gain clarity about what they mean. She uses a matrix inappropriately to parse bits of a conversation (slide 59); she uses a ven diagram with five bubbles when it only needs four (the overlap of four bubbles should be “us” in slide 3); She even tells us directly “I’m terrible at graphing” (slide 55). The faulty execution of these visuals leaves us with the impression that Allison doesn’t fully understand what she’s presenting, and it adds a great deal to the narrative. It seems to me that PowerPoint may be a great tool for writers using an unreliable narrator.
The chapter culminates with several charts about rock & roll pauses which are enjoyably subjective and remind me, at least in concept, of Andrew Kuo’s work.
I’m looking forward to reading the whole book.
This Wired article charts the nature and location of calls.
(Via Infosthetics)
Jenny Odell (via Things Magazine):
The Satellite Collection is a series of six digital prints that I made by collaging cut-out imagery from Google Satellite. Each one is printed and framed at 24”x24”
Note: The site seems to be down at the moment, so you can view the other images here for now.
From Think Studio:
The plan of the book is simple: two hundred pages; five thousand dots to a page. The result: one million dots. Notes that correspond to occasional numbers point out unusual and informative historical, political, anatomical and sociological information that add up to help the concept hit home. Author and New Yorker editor Hendrik Hertzberg wants the reader to actually see, perhaps for the first time ever, exactly one million of something. To keep the simple design lively, the value of the dots were varied so they twinkle and animate a bit.
