Posts from the “Creative” Category

Vibrant Colr

Posted on August 3rd, 2005

You may remember a few months ago I highlighted some cool information visualisations, many of which tapped into the Flickr API to do some cool things with photos etc. Since then a fair few more have appeared so I thought I might post a few screenshots and links here of the best: Tagged Colors “This application represents the relationship between words and colors using all the images from the Color Fields group in Flickr. Key factors are the homogeneity between the colors of all the images registered to the tag, the attributes of the average of these colors and of course the popularity of the tag.” Flickr Colr Pickr “Using images from the Color Fields group on Flickr, Jim has created a beautiful and…

Discovery Take Off

Posted on August 1st, 2005

(c) Keith Meyers/The New York Times Whilst observers held their breath as the space shuttle Discovery blasted into space last week hundreds of scientists at NASA monitored every conceivable aspect of the take off after the Columbia accident which took the lives of all seven crew members. To assist in this analysis NASA has assembled a database containing information about more than 15,000 recorded debris hits from shuttle flights since 1983 (see graphic below). Unfortunately there are no clear-cut answers to the problem and indeed the fragility of the craft is still a matter of speculation. (c) Columbia Accident Investigation Report, NASA As to most people space, and what we may find out there, fascinates me but it seems such a shame that exploring…

Super-sized

Posted on June 14th, 2005

The Airbus A380 super-jumbo at the Paris air show yesterday It’s good to know that there are still some industries in which Europe is the leader in terms of innovation, a fine example being the new Airbus A380 which follows in the footsteps of aircraft like Concorde in being pioneers of new technology. With a seating capacity of up to 840 and a wingspan of 80m the A380 is one enormous aircraft the likes of which have never been seen before. Whether of not it will be a high-flyer is still a matter of speculation however impressive it is.

Ecotonoha

Posted on June 5th, 2005

Check out this cool interactive visualisation designed by NEC which utilises some seriously slick flash: “Ecotonoha is a project – to nurture a virtual tree collaboratively, and at the same time contribute to the actual environment to cope with global warming. As you make Ecotonaha’s leaves, the virtual tree will grow, and as Ecotonoha grows, real trees will be planted by NEC” [via Core77] Annieisms, Is It? – Apparently video blogging is the future, is this the ultimate form of narcissism or actually pretty cool? I’d go with the latter, especially if there all as good as this! I would imagine though that one of these takes a fair amount longer to put together than your average blog post so whether it will catch…

Re-engineer?

Posted on May 23rd, 2005

Apparently if you thought the debacle over the designs for the new World Trade Center were over you’d be wrong. Donald Trump, a notorious American real-estate executive, has been openly critical of the Libeskind ‘Freedom Tower’ design (photo left) and has put forward his own design (right) which is basically an exact copy of the original but one story taller, dubbed the ‘Twin Towers II‘. Seems like good intentions have become wrapped up in politics and money which I guess was inevitable. Everyone involved was bound to have differing opinions of what a fitting memorial/replacement was but isn’t it about time, 4 years later, that they get on with it and actually built something instead of leaving the site as an open tomb? To…

Graphic Meltdown

Posted on March 29th, 2005

There seems to be a bit of silent revolution sweeping the Internet right now being that of information association – web portals are springing up which allow you to upload various content and categorise it according to keyword tags as well as others which allow you to carry out visual query’s on data scraped together from a variety of different sources. It’s all very cool until you realise just how much information there actually is out there now – more than it’s worth thinking about! Recently I’ve noticed a growing number of small online visualisation tools which allow you to carry out dynamic queries on this data – some of it’s purely for fun, while others have serious objectives. Below I’ve gathered together and…

Maglev Flight

Posted on March 23rd, 2005

I’ve been running an alpha build of Dropline Gnome 2.10 for the last couple of days and must say I’m impressed. Everything seems a bit snappier & there have been some nice UI enhancements. My desktop looks even better now! I was pointed in the direction of a cool little visualisation applet today which graphically represents the hyperlinks for any given web address in a literal tree. While this is nothing really new it’s neat to play with and see the tree’s growing on screen. My own site looks particularly brocolie-like to me! Have a go yourself with the texone::tree here. I was intrigued today by an article about a new maglev train which has just recently opened to the public in Shanghai. With…

People & Works

Posted on March 12th, 2005

As a general observation much of the best graphic design seems to be coming out of Japan these days. Maybe it just looks fresh to us because we’re not used to it but it seems to have a certain edge which is lacking in the West (purely my own rather uninformed opinion!). The Nagaoka Institute of Design is a good point in question where a quick browse will show you some pretty cool stuff. Be sure to take a look at the Collection 2005 Gallery where the flash interface is as radical as some of its content. [via Future Feeder] Seriously nifty if you ask me – good visualisation in action, simple but very effective (as well as being quite fun!). It was created…

Quasi Design

Posted on March 5th, 2005

Been a stressful last few days with deadlines looming and things are becoming a bit tense. Food in college has reached new lows recently so cheese sandwiches are becoming more regular Other than that things are good – at least my room is big, warm & relatively comfortable! Since my recent foray into graphic design I’ve been searching around the net and have found some pretty good design blogs which I’ve added to a new links category on the nav bar. Check them out! By chance I’ve stubled accross a lot of facinating photography related links recently which I though are worth sharing: Photos of Paris Flood, 1910 – Amazing Sepia and B&W photos of Paris underwater. World War 2 Pictures in Colour –…

Tube/Subway/Metro

Posted on March 1st, 2005

The design of the London Underground map has long fascinated me. It’s abandonment of conventional geographic layout was pure genius on the part of its creator, Harry Beck, in 1933 and continues to be the model for which the majority of MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) systems around the world base their maps today. I’d been looking for an excuse for a while to produce my own ‘underground’ style map using similar principles but never really managed to justify it… until now! Using some possibly rather tenuous reasoning I decided to map Durham (where I live!) as part of my ‘Network Visualisation‘ project that I’m carrying out this year for my course. The preliminary result can be seen below, and I’m pretty pleased with it…

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