IBM Smart Planet

Check IBM's Smart planet website. Not only see beautiful icons and posters, but also motion graphic.
Joe Makower from The Energy Collective wrote an insightful story about this IBM ad campaign that explains its goals and strategy and includes interviews with Rich Lechner, IBM’s VP of Energy and Environment and John Kennedy, VP of Integrated Marketing Communications.
also check it from DataVisualization.ch website

Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

From TED: "Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing."

Pivot is still an experiment, not a finished product. It isn't available for Mac or Linux yet, and not even to Windows xp users.

visit http://memo.hardrock.com to view a Pivot collection inside of Silverlight. The interface is different than Pivot's, but there's nothing stopping anyone from porting the controls over to a Silverlight app.

This demo also shows how important that is to make your data computer readable , i.e. semantically tagged.

Edward Tufte

"Sometimes decorations can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it's wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme." Edward Tufte
His website: http://www.edwardtufte.com/

David Stack's notes from a seminar by Edward R. Tufte (8/17/9)

Book for infographic

Dona Wong: The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics

"In today's data-driven world, professionals need to know how to express themselves in the language of graphics effectively and eloquently. Yet information graphics is rarely taught in schools or is the focus of on-the-job training. Now, for the first time, Dona M. Wong, a student of the information graphics pioneer Edward Tufte, makes this material available for all of us. "

Wong began her visual jouralism career at the New York Times in the 1990s as the business graphic editor and worked as a graphics director at the Wall Street Journal from 2001. Recently, She has been appointed the strategy director for information at Sigel+Gale.

Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages

Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages, a video looking back at the pictograms of Olympic games. To know the evolution and hear Steven Heller 's criticism about the design. Source form New York Times.

Josef Müller-Brockmann’s visualization

Josef Müller-Brockmann’s visualization: a personal web research project about Josef Müller-Brockmann and the international typographical style by Quentin Delobel

More resource for infographic

visual-literacy.org
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

You’ll find many more amazing infographics on the following websites:

• Info Graphics Flickr Group
  Charts, graphs, facts, anything that is about information or visualizing information.
• InfoVis Flickr Group
  Information Visualization: The creation of something visual from something abstract. Graphs, maps, charts, numbers. The compression of data and the expansion of meaning. Scientific, creative, useful, worthless.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• Showcase of Data Visualization and Infographics
• Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
• Award-Winning Newspaper Designs
• Creative Calendar Designs

Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization

{Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization}
An illustrated chronology of innovations by Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis
A good web reference for graphic designers who want to study info-graphic. It is interesting to check both their old web site and the current one to see how the idea was developed and visualized.

Evolution of Olympic Pictograms-1964 to 2012

Evolution of Olympic Pictograms-1964 to 2012 from creativerepository.com

UI Patterns

UI Patterns: User interface design pattern Library. A great problem solving tool.

"It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are called design patterns; standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him. "
This site will help you in two ways: You can read insightful design pattern articles or browse through the screenshot collection.

Designing Interfaces

I couldn't stop laughing when I saw Jenifer Tidwell's comment on the cover design for her book: Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design.
"Why a duck? I have no idea. O'Reilly's people picked it, not me, but I think it has something to do with the fact that Mandarin ducks are colorful, and the book was printed in full color. Also, some of their other Web books have birds on their covers. (But he's cute, isn't he?)"

This is the case you can't judge a book by its cover. A fantastic intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language. Check it's web site for more information.

Few Links for infographics

Erin Williams from Rethink has a nice article about data and design: Sexy data: getting over your top five hang-ups. Pay attention to the A/B test for a lowly 404 page for Mountain Equipment Co-Op and the improved landing page design to see how design enhances business.



Also, don't miss the infographic link to check the 40 useful and creative infographics. At least I will keep the Coffee Drinks illustration as a reference.

50 great examples of infographics

50 great examples of infographics from http://blogof.francescomugnai.com