Benjamin Edwards: Works, Projects, Archive
A very interesting visualization project — Benjamin Edwards maps the “world according to Wal*Mart”. A cartogram that depicts where the retail giant’s products (and revenues) come from. While you may not be surprised that the bulk of products come from China, I was astonished more by who was absent from this equation. Japan is non-existent, Korea is very, very small, and most South and Central American countries have almost no presence.
Cribsheet #9: String Theory
Scientific issues and innovations are figuring into everyday conversation
more than ever before. Recognizing that we could all use some brushing up, Seed offers its Cribsheet.
9
String Theory
To unite the seemingly incompatible worlds of the very large and the very small, physicists propose string theory, a model of the universe in which tiny strings vibrate in more than three dimensions. This Cribsheet covers the basics of string theory: what it says, why we think it might give us a unified theory of physics, and whether experiment supports it. In addition, we tell you how the strings are shaped and why string theory may not be the final “theory of everything.”
Download the Crib Sheet
Illustrator: Cybu Richli — www.cybu.ch; Writers: Lee Billings & Joshua Roebke; Consultant: Clifford V. Johnson, University of Southern California; Graph Data: Nick Halmagyi, Compton Lectures, University of Chicago, 2006. Additional calculations by Joshua Roebke; Reference: A First Course in String Theory, Barton Zweibach, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Originally from Seed Magazine
reBlogged by michael on Apr 17, 2007, 10:53PM
FSI Releases Spiekermann’s FF Mt
April 1, 2007, Berlin — 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.
Before (left): Inconsistent hierarchy. Is Mönchengladbach less important than Münster or Dortmond? After (right): Clean hierarchy, increased legibility, 15% smaller sign saves costs.
In addition to its conservationist benefits, FF Mt also enables the generation of buzzwords, product names, and Web 2.0 domains as the user types.
Finally, FF Mt prepares us for the future. 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.
FSI FontShop International believes this tool is so revolutionary and beneficial to the Earth that access should not be limited to the few. Starting today, April 1 2007, the cross-platform OpenType font is available for free at FontFont.com.
Syndication sponsor: Use this link to buy fonts at Veer and they’ll turn your type love into Typographica support.
Originally from Typographica
reBlogged by michael on Apr 1, 2007, 9:38AM
Wireframing With Patterns
Published: March 20, 2007
When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects.
Originally from UXmatters
reBlogged by michael on Mar 19, 2007, 11:02PM
A brief critique of 31 Days in Iraq NYT Infographic
Over the past few months, the New York Times has produced a series of graphs illuminating different aspects of the Iraq conflict. While most of these graphs are straightforward presentations of the information, the most recent infographic on the past 31 days of the Iraq war represents an highly editorial standpoint, and uses poor design, [...]
cartographic flow map layout
a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, & flow data between the nodes. flow maps aim to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network.
the advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. most flow maps are drawn by hand & there are few computer algorithms available. this particular technique is inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings & distort node positions while maintaining their relative position to one another.
see also pivotgraph.
[link: stanford.edu]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Feb 20, 2007, 5:27AM
Cities as Billboards
The train of thought that I started as I discussed Fabien Girardin’s Flickr heatmaps a few posts back, and which led me to thinking about mining consumer line-of sight data to target advertising, seems to be continuing here in a recent New York Times article about how advertisers are now looking to use what they would consider "unsold" space to place their messages. This phenomenon even has a name, urban spam.
But why just post the same ad for everyone to see? Why not use an individual viewer’s line of sight as they travel as a "channel" into which to project ads and messages where blank space exists? Fabien’s recent post, illustrated here, shows the "traces" left by Flickr photographers as they transit Barcelona. Where his heat maps showed the locations of single images, the traces follow the path the photographer takes through the city, or his visual corridor, if you will.
Originally from Smartspace by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 17, 2007, 6:41PM
Structuring the invisible
[Image: Courtesy of NASA/ESA/MASSEY, via the BBC].
“Astronomers have mapped the cosmic ‘scaffold’ of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled,” the BBC reports. Producing the map “involved nearly 1,000 hours of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.” But it was time well-spent: the map now “confirms that galaxy clusters are located within clumps of this invisible material. These clumps are connected via bridges of dark matter called filaments. The clumps and filaments form a loose network – like a web.”
We are thus surrounded by structures of the invisible.
In an interesting analogy, we read that “the challenge of mapping the Universe has been described as similar to mapping a city from night-time aerial snapshots showing only street lights.” But now they have the actual physical layout of the streets – or something like that.
Having said all this, let me admit to an outsider’s sense that either 1) the astronomers are wrong: there is no dark matter; dark matter is just a calculational artifact of the current model used to represent universal space (and, thus, this map actually shows something else); or 2) they’re right about all of it – except the use of the word matter, which is referentially misleading; it is not matter at all.
(Earlier: See Filaments of space-time, where you can read about “huge arc-bubbles of light colliding with themselves in glowing, superskeletal networks, filling space like translucent caulk”).
Originally
from BLDGBLOG
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Jan 7, 2007, 7:02PM
creative calendar design
- a compact calendar designed to provide a compact view of the year, with plenty of space for making annotations & doodling. can be downloaded as a printable Excel template.
- the 12-sided calendar, putting the months on a so called “rhombic” or normal “dodecahedron”. can be downloaded as a DIY folding & cutting kit.
- a spiral calendar, capturing time as a continuous entity.
- the information esthetic calendar, a minimalistic design that invites for creating annotations in a unique visual code. can be downloaded or purchased as a large size poster.
- the Publikum calendar, transforming the Cyrillic alphabet into ameaningless cacophony of shapes.
- a typograhic calendar, displaying a classic typeface each month, aiming to enhance the awareness of typographic design.
[links: davidseah.com & uib.no & luispabon.com & informationesthetics.org & mediabistro.com & pentagram.com]
Originally
from information aesthetics
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 27, 2006, 1:56AM
relative star & planet size movie
a small animation illustrating the relative size of stars & plants, from Mercury (4,480km) over Jupiter (142,984km) to W Cephei (3,676,200,000km).
see also relative size of our world.
[link: video.google.co.uk]
Originally
from information aesthetics
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 27, 2006, 11:37PM
