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RAINFALL, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

The poster follows on from the light calendar series, and is a graph that charts average rainfall in the UK between 1971-2000. The graph itself is styled to resemble a downpour of rain. The bars are plotted directly over the weather station’s that they relate to, which gives an abstracted map of the UK.

Flags by Colours, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Each sector of these piecharts is proportional to the area of the colour on the respective flag.

Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined. (note: Colours making up less than 1% may not appear)

(Give a look and try to recognize them)

The Indo-European Family of Languages, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

This diagram from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a delightful family tree of Indo-European languages, but it does not explain the complexity of the language evolution and his hystory.

In the last numeber of Nova Merrit Ruhlen wrote an interesting article about this topic. As soon as possible I’ll put here the full text.

Social Circles – Venn map, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Brad Firzpatrick recently wrote an elegant and important post about the Social Graph, a term used by Facebook to describe their social network In his post, Fitzpatrick defines “social graph” as “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related”. He went on to outline the problems with it, as well as a broad set of goals going forward…

Full article avaible here:
Social Graph: Concepts and Issues, by Alex Iskold

brief message, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form (200 words or less).

Global cities, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

An infographically-inspired exhibition at the Tate Modern addressing the major issues facing today’s cities, such as size, speed, form, density & diversity. The exhibition draws on data originally assembled for the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale. The show presents films, videos & photographs by more than 20 artists and architects to offer subjective & intimate interpretations of urban conditions in all 10 cities.

Global cities, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Graphics (by Pentagram) are really part of the exhibition.
Wooden models created from data compiled by the LSE represent the population density in London, Mexico City, Mumbai & Cairo. Clear information graphics are complemented by bold typographic statements. The restrained graphic language communicates key facts that add context to the artwork on display.

FF Mt, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

FSI FontShop International proudly announces FF Mt™, Erik Spiekermann’s most economical typeface ever. Employing obscure but powerful techniques like vwl mmssn and cap reduction, FF Mt uses up to 50% less paper, screen real estate, and wall space than other text faces without a single condensed letter.The German government has already incorporated FF Mt in their road sign system.

English is changing. With the popularity of MMS and internet chat, spelling reform is occurring at a quickened pace. FF Mt accommodates this new condensed written language now. Any copy set in this advanced font will conform to next-generation standards, yet still pass present-day spell checkers.

According to one definition¹, engineering is making things based on scientific principles – as opposed to the intuitive making that defines a craft. Information visualization (InfoVis) is practiced like a craft today, based mostly on practical examples, but not on theoretical basics. Here is a sketch of not only InfoVis as an engineering field, but InfoVis as a science.
We could model the science of InfoVis after physics, a well-established science. If we assume that we already have the engineering part, then there’s also theoretical physics, experimental physics, and computational physics. That last one is of course less interesting for a field that can’t exist without computers, so we’ll just treat it as a part of the other two. Other than that, this seems to be a good model for visualization. Work certainly already exists in theoretical and experimental visualization (even though most user studies for testing techniques would be better considered engineering), but a better understanding of the different types of work would help steer that research, and also make it easier to put work into context.

The following is a rough sketch of the work in those different areas, and what the connections between them would be:

• Theoretical InfoVis. Propose theories for a better understanding of visualization, based on observed phenomena (like experiments and user studies) and other theoretical work from visualization, psychology, aesthetics, semiotics, etc. These models not only need to explain what has been observed, but also allow the prediction of properties that new techniques should or will have to have to be successful.
• Experimental InfoVis. Devise experimental methods for testing theories from theoretical InfoVis as well as understanding observed phenomena in InfoVis engineering. Perform experiments and propose theories and further experiments based on their results.
• InfoVis Engineering. Application development and user testing. Design new techniques and applications for specific user tasks, and test their success in user studies. Devise approaches to basing application development on the results of theoretical and experimental InfoVis. Feed back results into the other two areas.

Given the size of the field, there would (and should) certainly not be a clear distinction between these areas of research in terms of the people involved. A clearer distinction for the purposes of paper submissions and discussions would be helpful, however.
It should also be noted that all of these fields have a meta-role as well: they need not only develop their theories, applications, etc., but also the methods for doing that work. and for translating their results for the other fields.
One specific difficulty in visualization (as opposed to physics and other hard sciences) is that it is much more difficult to move research results between the different fields. There is no well-defined underlying universal basis (like mathematics) to allow translation of results: the common factor are human perception and cognition, fields that are still not very well understood, and won’t be for the foreseeable future.

Some of the above certainly also applies to scientific visualization and visual analytics, and theoretical work would hopefully lead to a much better understanding of the considerable overlap between these fields.
InfoVis will not be able to survive as a field without becoming a proper science. The methods for this science still need to be developed, and we need to do more than just copying other fields (like we do to an extent right now with perception, computer graphics, etc.). But the field needs to move beyong being a craft.

¹Mitcham C., 1994. Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago,University of Chicago Press

( by Robert Kosara @ eagereyes.org)

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?

Smashing magazine give the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.