“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.”

Visit the the original post and see the full graphic.

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

“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.

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

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

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”.

Visit the Luxirare website

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.”

Visit her full post.