“Information from millions of taxi trips provides a telling record of the city’s vital signs. The map shows the average number of pickups for different times of the day and days of week, Jan. – March, 2009″
View the visualization at nytimes.com
Have you ever wanted to be invisible in the middle of the city? Well a group of German artists have achieved this lofty goal. By designing their camouflage to look like the surrounding urban environments they essentially disappeared from the landscape. OK, mostly. Cool project.
View the full post with all of the photos.
“Even though water comes out of the faucet looking clean and clear, there is a good chance it has some pretty nasty stuff in it. A new study has cataloged all the pollutants and chemicals that appear in our tap water, and they include things like arsenic and fuel additives. Many of these pollutants are unregulated, meaning no matter how high a dose appears in your water, it’s still not illegal.”
There are about 300,000,000 of us in the USA, spread out over 3,794,101 sq. miles. In other words if we wanted to we could all move into and live in an area the size of New Hampshire; the 5th smallest US state (8,968 sq. miles) with extra room for more more parks.
Visit the the original post and see the full graphic.
via: @timoni
With the advent of HTML5 there has been a plethora of information available online on how to understand, program and work with this new specification. The following is a list of what I consider the be the best and most helpful HTML5 articles, tutorials or websites that I’ve found over the past year.
Please let me know through a comment if you know of any other great HTML5 articles, tutorials or websites, and I’ll be glad to post them. Also thanks to all of the folks who produced all of these great free learning experiences.
As more and more companies & start-ups contact ideacodes for smartphone design, I found the need to make a link list of templates I might need to use. Recently, I found many of the templates were no longer available online. This is what led to this post. Here I will showcase smartphone templates I’ve found on the web, and archive them at my site, so even if the original source goes away, the templates will still be available.
Special thanks to all of the hard working designers that have created these awesome smartphone templates! Also, please check the original source for usage requirements.
“At the beginning of a web (or application) development project I always create the sketches first. While sketching can be done on a blank paper, it’s much better to use a sketch template. For me that is the best and most productive way to work on and improve my ideas before application development begins (and things get more complicated. This way I won’t pay too much attention to some details that should be taken care of later, but stay focused on general layout and functionality.”
Visit the geekchic.org website to view the full post and download the templates.
Climate change scientists have started a fightback against sceptics who argue that the observed changes in the Earth’s climate can largely be explained by natural variability. This comes after the email hacking furore.
A major Met Office review of more than 100 scientific studies tracking the observed changes in the Earth’s climate system finds that it is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change.
In this not to be missed video, Michael Bierut of Pentagram discusses some very relevant strategies on dealing with clients. This talk was part of the CreativeMornings Series and was conducted in January 2010 at the Galapagos Art Space and hosted by Swissmiss design. This is one of my favorite design related videos of all time.
Special thanks to Swissmiss for putting together this awesome program, and making it available to everyone.
Visit the Swissmiss website to watch the video
Screenshot of Typekit
Tonight I decided to give the new font service Typekit a try on my website. The service uses your browsers inherent ability to link fonts, and has worked out licensing with a number of font houses so you can link these fonts with no fear of legal action. The quote from Typekit below basically says it all.
Screenshot of the the USA Today jobs growth forecast visualization
USA Today created a nice visualization of jobs growth between 2010 – 2013. It’s interesting to see the varience in different states, cities and job sectors.
This is a sample page created by noted typographer Erik Spiekermann using WOFF versions of FF Meta and FF Meta Serif displayed in Firefox 3.6 beta.
In my opinion the web open font format could be one of the biggest additions to web design in many years. Imagine being able to design for the web with hundreds of new fonts. Mozilla and several type foundries are already onboard. For now we’ll just have to wait and see how many other browsers adopt this wonderful new standard.
Efforts to bring advanced typography to the Web have reached an important milestone. Type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, who had been working to developing the .webfont format, combined forces with Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew, who had been working independently on a similar format. The result of the collaboration is called Web Open Font Format (WOFF), and it has the backing of a wide array of type designers and type foundries. Mozilla will also include support for it in Firefox 3.6.
WOFF combines the work of Leming and Blokland had done on embedding a variety of useful font metadata with the font resource compression that Kew had developed. The end result is a format that includes optimized compression that reduces the download time needed to load font resources while incorporating information about the font’s origin and licensing. The format doesn’t include any encryption or DRM, so it should be universally accepted by browser vendors—this should also qualify it for adoption by the W3C.
From: Ars Technica and EmilyChang
This is one of the best creative quotes I’ve ever read, and directly relates to my own creative process.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photos, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
- Jim Jarmusch
If you love great design do yourself a favor and visit the Luxirare website.
“Luxirare is a weekly webzine dedicated to clothing and cuisine. At Luxirare, the typical notion of a seasonal fashion show or seasonal “menu” does not exist. Styles and recipes are presented as individual pieces that do not follow a strict theme but rather a flow of ideas. The Luxirare principle is to use the unique mobility of the internet to develop an enticing, unorthodox presentation”.
A post by Emily Chang.
“I’ve heard about QR codes for years and Googled for them long ago before they were readily available for consumers, but for some reason tonight, they popped into my mind again and I decided to look them up. I was excited to see that you can make your own QR code easily online. In simple terms, a QR code is a graphic 2D barcode that stores information, such as addresses, URLs, business card info, or anything else.”
The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
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Let’s face it: do you really need drag-and-drop, resizable windows or sortable lists in your web applications? Websites are not desktop applications. They are different.
What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those “web 2.0″ goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.
This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
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jqModal is a plugin for jQuery to help you display notices, dialogs, and modal windows in a web browser. It is flexible and tiny, akin to a “Swiss Army Knife”, and makes a great base as a general purpose windowing framework.
Nexus is a Facebook visualization which creates an interactive image with your friends’ connections and their shared interests.
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