Studio Cruz Google Earth tour

The Google Earth blog posted an article about Studio Cruz' work on the recent Fleet Week tour here.

Stop motion advertisements

Two beautifully made stop motion advertisements for Brother printers from the UK designer Noah Harris.

Horizonless projection of Manhattan

These horizonless perspectives of Manhattan, reminding one of the interior of the cylindrical spaceship in Arthur C Clarke's story "Rendezvous with Rama", were created by James King, a British designer, for the design consultancy BERG. A more detailed discussion of the project is here.

Public visualization

A beautiful example of data - in this case a fire station's callouts - presented publicly as mural art. Why don't more public bodies do this?

Google Elements

The Periodic Table of Elements revisited at Google's Mountain View offices. Nice work.

How data changes how we live

The UK Daily Telegraph has an article showing ten ways in which innovative data collection and presentation is changing the way we live. It includes a link to the UK Government's new open data site, something I'll look at more closely in a later post.

Yes we Canberra

Patrick Clair's satirical animation of Canberra as composed entirely of infographics was made for the recent Australian election. Great timing and animation.

New York Times graphics

An article with a long list of interactive New York Times infographics for use in teaching social studies, history, and economics.

Matters of Principle

Not an infographic or an animation, but simply an elegant Flash interface to Gary Hart's blog Matters of Principle.

Rock, paper, scissors

A simple, entertaining Rock Paper Scissors infographic which illustrates many of the points of a good instructional diagram: intuitively accessible images classified by color and shape, simple wording, a clear course (yet with the option for the leisured reader to pursue sidebars), a strong implied story, and logical development through the course of reading. Ending with the left field "Spock move" introduces humor and surprise - and helps retention - without taking away from the value of the piece. The equivalent of a page of text but faster - and probably more effective. Don't overlook the Download Full Size option to print it out for fledging RPS players in your circle.

Siggraph 2010

This three minute trailer for last month's 2010 Siggraph Animation Festival gives an idea of what's possible in animation today. Siggraph, for those not familiar with it, is the the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, and its annual conference is the leading US forum for animation professionals and researchers. A dozen of the short, stunning pieces in the Animation Theater are also shown here.

Well formed data

This intelligent post on well-formed-data.net neatly paraphrases a longer article on acm.interactions.org, and in an engaging and concise fashion describes the useful concept of propositional density in information design. Most graphic and information designers are aware of the field-ground duality in the FedEx logo (the arrow defined by the E and the x), but this draws on that example to propose a general classification of design quality. I have long been an advocate of elegance in design, but seldom able to describe it as well as in this post. The links, if you have time, are also worth following. A recommended 120 second (minimum) read.