Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know and becoming friends with Jonathan Harris through all sorts of different avenues, projects he has done, and more recently the times we’ve found ourselves in the desert in Jordan together. He’s truly one of the most thoughtful, inspiring, and talented folks I know. And I meet a lot of people.
Absolutely beautiful images based on something called Delaunay triangulations, which maximize the minimum angle of all the angles of the triangles in the triangulation; they tend to avoid skinny triangles.
This was created using a scripting plug-in for Illustrator by Jonathan Puckey– he calls his work Delaunay Rasters. Check them out, the faces are so great.
Two trends are still holding strong in 2009 – the popularity of Twitter and mashups. Using only XHTML/CSS and Javascript, the clan at Quodis Labs has created a beautiful real-time visualisation of updates in the Twitterverse. Dubbed Tori’s Eye, visitors simply click each origami bird as it “flies” across your screen and read the message it’s carrying. You can always change the default search (twitpic) to anything that interests you. Truly a different and quirky way to present information.
Site favorite and JS friend Jonathan Harris just launched his latest project entitled The Sputnik Observatory. It’s the result of a two-year collaboration with NYC based Sputnik, Inc, an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences, and technology worlds. There are about 200 videos on the site today, and there will be thousands more added over the coming weeks, months, and years.
In Jonathan’s words:
The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.
Deciphering samples is a skill that every DJ and producer hones in order to boast when that original song comes on. Ever since a few cats took the art of sampling and went crazy with it, it’s been harder and harder to breakdown. Take Girl Talk for instance; despite the pop value of every song used in his collages, bet you can’t name every single one. And furthermore, how does this patchwork Lego set of beats and pieces actually come together to form a coherent track? Thanks to Wired Magazine, there’s a translation for folks who consider themselves more on the visual tip. A deconstruction of 30 seconds of a the Girl Talk Song ‘What It’s All About’ reveals 35 samples assembled to create that signature dancefloor crack sound. Great visualization via Wired.
We’ve been digging on info-graphs for a while, it’s our preferred method of learning. Intuitiongames is hosting an info-graph game titled “effing hail” explaining the weather through destruction. For those of you that don’t know how hail is formed, basically small water droplets get caught in a whirl wind deep inside a freezing thunder cloud. The longer they get blown around the more water collects to freeze and thus larger hail. Wouldn’t you prefer an info-graph to that explanation?
The premise of the game is to keep the small pieces of hail in the sky so its get bigger and bigger. Once they get to a certain size the small gust of wind you control can direct your moster ice rock to crash into a skyscraper or a plane. Damage is the goal. I got to the level where you had to take out some satellites. I couldn’t do it, maybe you can. It’s Friday, let’s play games!
New York City vendors are one of the many things we love/hate about the city. Everyone has a story of some amazing/crazy street vendor experience. The Street Vendor Project has put together a visual guide for vendor regulations, rights and history and it looks amazing. Working with the Center for Urban Pedagogy designer Candy Chang put together all the information that goes into vending life (there's a lot). I now know enough to open up my own stand and battle off the cops when they try to slap a fine for on my ass for the distance between the cart and the curb. Seriously, the street has rules! You can check out a PDF sample here. If you read anything on the graph, make sure to read the sample stories at the bottom. Really interesting and heart breaking tales of what life as a vendor holds.
We covered Flight404 several months ago and even then we were blown away by the work Robert Hodgin was doing with Processing. Nearly ten months later, we're still in awe of his stunning visuals, but this time around we're crushing on his latest animation creations, Magnetic Ink and Solar. Also created using Process video, Hodgin's breathtakingly transformative works of computer generated art show a chaotic hairball masterwork in black, white and grey and an otherworldly, colorful source of life and light, respectively. The animations are made even more stunning by the musical accompaniment in the form of music from The Flashbulb.
HumanFlows is the first of a series of projects conceived during the Visualizar workshop organized by the Medialab Prado in Madrid. Led by graphic designer Miguel Cabanzo, the ongoing project takes the growing trend of visualization into the study of globalization. HumanFlows maps trends of migration in the hopes of getting insight into their causes. Rather than focus exclusively on present trends, HumanFlows gathers data from the last 15 years to create a more comprehensive picture.
Given a clear visual idea of the directions people have moved their lives (realistically and figuratively), you can't help but wonder why. What impetus encouraged huge groups of people from point A to point B, rather than point C? It's simple to rattle off answers like “war†and “poverty†without thought, but to look at these maps and think of how actual humans have been impacted brings issues into a more powerful and personal focus.
Though still in its nascent stages, the project kicks off with map filters such as Gross Domestic Product and Unemployment. The goal is to build on this framework with more data and to shed light on the inter-connections between the different causes for people to migrate and the impact on the nations who receive them.
List views are so 2007; next up in the growing line-up of visualization interfaces is a new service from Youtube that lets you visually search related videos.
Looking perhaps a little too much like (and moving noticeably slower than) digg labs' swarm, related videos move around your current choice in multi-coloured bubbles. As you scroll into the other topics, the recs shift based on your preferences and the bubble colours change to help you keep track of which themes you've chosen and those you've steered away from. Click on any bubble to watch the vid. A white line, giving you a nifty trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to where you started, instantly connects the videos you decide to watch.
Currently only available in full-screen mode and not yet on all videos, the search takes a little bit of time to get used to. Once you're in the groove and let your right brain take charge, it's easy and fast to intuitively move around and find a whole treasure trove of videos you probably wouldn't come across by search alone.
As digital artist in residence for the NYC's Lower East Side Tenement Museum, graphic artist Jeremy Hutchison's latest project is a study of what happens when people explore the grandiosities of nationality in a more personal light.
We Are Multicolored asks visitors to answer three simple questions “Where is your home?†“What other country has affected you?†and “Where have you dreamed of going?†Supplied with the flags of the three nations you answered, you then use the project's design tool to develop your own personal flag.
By distilling their own experiences and self-image through the globally-recognized act of producing a flag, each person is given a chance to investigate which nationalities, cultures, and plain ol' personal design styles they would choose to represent that essence of themselves to the rest of the world.
Every time a personal flag is created it's added to a “superflag,†a continuously shifting tapestry made of all the flags created on the site. Users can click on any individual flag to learn about the person it represents and why they chose the nations they did.
As creator and all-around genius behind UK design shop Universal Everything, Matt Pyke serves up some of the most eye-catching and jaw-dropping digital design on the planet. His client list includes heavy hitters like Apple, Adidas, MTV, Coke, Nokia, Nike and a little shindig called the 2012 London Summer Olympics.
The anticipation for his latest project is keeping me up at night: Advanced Beauty is a series of “sound sculptures” curated by Universal Everything with sound design by frequent collaborator Freeform, the music project led by Matt's brother, Simon Pyke. Each segment is visually and sonically unique and directed by groundbreaking designers from around the world – including visionaries like Marc Kremers, Karsten Schmidt, Thomas Traum, Alex Peverett, Tom Scholefield, Paul Simpson, and Jonathan Garin.
If the awe-inspiring trailer and lushly color-filled first segment by New York-based designer and SpearTalks Alum Mate Steinforth are any indication, then we're in for a total breakthrough when Advanced Beauty finally drops in Spring 2008. I think it’s pretty safe to say right now: Advanced Beauty will be the shit.
If you're like us you've got a wealth of important information stored on your laptop. Were the great hard drive crash of '08 to take place you'd probably be in quite a fix. In this digital age having your files backed up is an absolutely crucial but not necessarily fashionable concern. Some external hard-drives are downright dreary with design as appealing as that of a cinder block. Thanks to the folks at Netherlands-based de groene banaan, your data storage can now be a thing of artistic inspiration. The IVY a unique hard drive using OLED technology shows just how much of the drive you are using by illuminating the design on the screen. When empty, the IVY appears a blank canvas but as you gradually fill it, it resembles more of a Mondrian masterpiece. Now that's innovation.
We’ve been digging on info-graphs for a while, it’s our preferred method of learning. 
As digital artist in residence for the NYC's 
If you're like us you've got a wealth of important information stored on your laptop. Were the great hard drive crash of '08 to take place you'd probably be in quite a fix. In this digital age having your files backed up is an absolutely crucial but not necessarily fashionable concern. Some external hard-drives are downright dreary with design as appealing as that of a cinder block. Thanks to the folks at Netherlands-based 
