Some of you might have noticed that Logorama won the animated short Oscar last Sunday.
Directed by H5, a French team responsible for Massive Attack, Röyksopp and Goldfrapp videos to name a few, have created a brilliant not-not-so-subtle statement on consumer culture. Check out the trailer.

Logorama Trailer from www.club-construct.com on Vimeo.

I’ve always loved maps and charts and their potential for contextualizing data, whether its historical, statistical or recreational. As a kid I would spend hours looking at maps of human migration patterns and charts listing the populations of the world’s largest cities. I could study them for hours and revel in all the relationships I could form from all the data. The systematic complexity of them was mesmerizing. It was my way of traveling the world and exploring before I could actually travel in the real world. I’m now well aware that many designers share the same obsessive compulsive tendencies in the presence of maps. After all, layering complex information in an attractive, easy to read information graphic is one of the trickiest puzzles for designers to solve. In this age of readily available data and rapidly advancing interactivity those old textbook atlases look like child’s play compared to what something like Google Earth can do.

New ways of layering data are being devised every day for a spectrum of different uses. Recently, I wrote a piece on the 1924 New York City aerial photography map courtesy of NYC.gov, a fascinating way to explore how the city has changed in some ways and hasn’t changed much in others. Over the last few weeks I’ve encountered several other sites that feature maps and charts that are bursting with volumes of interesting information, all describing the behavior of our society in their own way. Any of these could easily consume hours of your day if you start digging, so I’ve provided a brief description and some observations for each so you can pick your poison. The one general observation I’ll make about them is that there is an overarching tendency to pile on as much information as is readily available in several of these maps and charts, often making for overwhelming user experiences. While the pieces all serve very different purposes, I would maintain that transcending information graphics are those that manage to simplify complex granular data and stimulate big picture observations.

Feel free to post links to other great examples in your comments.

Title: A Peek Into Netflix Queues (NY Times)

Description: Rental activity of Netflix’s top movies is displayed on a zipcode heatmap in 12 US cities.

What you can learn: Demographic distribution of cities becomes apparent through rental patterns. Indie and critically acclaimed movies are watched by viewers in the wealthier zip codes, action movies are preferred in working class neighborhoods. A few movies, like Benjamin Button, manage to captivate across a wide swath of demographic variables. Tyler Perry movies are watched predominantly in African American neighborhoods. None of these statistics are surprising, but seeing them on a map helps us learn about how sharply Hollywood targets their audiences.

Observations: Beautifully done. Easy to use. Information is focused enough to not overwhelm. Check out this “making of” piece. Pretty interesting stuff.

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In Part 1 we discussed what exactly programming languages are, and what they do. So are we ready to write a program now? Well, not yet. There are a couple more things about programming languages in general that I think you should know before we get into coding itself. I know I said that I would show you some actual code this time around, but this entry turned out longer than anticipated, and as I’d rather not bore you with excessively long posts the code will have to wait until next time. Because I just know you’re itching to know what conditional statements are, right?

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History can be viewed in many ways, but man I’m I excited about this. I feel like I just found a time machine. NYC.gov has recently launched a Google-esque interactive aerial map of New York in 1924! I have now spent many hours obsessively traveling (virtually) all over the city to see how its changed. I’ve compiled some of my findings here to save everyone some time. Among other things you’ll see that the city was still sans airports in 1924, that there used to be another huge reservoir in Central Park, that the waterfront was much busier back then and that the city is much greener now than it used to be. This is a before and after history of New York City told by comparing aerial photography from 1924 and 2008. Much has changed in 84 years, and much has stayed the same. Here are some examples and observations.

All images are from NYC.gov. They were originally taken by Arthur S. Tuttle, Chief Engineer, Board of Estimate and Apportionment, who flew over the city in 1924 to document all of its landmarks.
You can navigate the map for yourself here
Click on the images below to enlarge.

The original World Trade Center complex was built from 1966 -1973. Battery Park City, an addition to Manhattan’s west side, was built where piers used to stand using landfill from the WTC construction.

Yankee Stadium (lower right) was only one year old in 1924. The stadium seen at the upper left is the Polo Grounds, home to the New York Giants (now in San Francisco). The Polo Grounds originally opened in 1890 and had just been renovated in 1923. It was demolished in 1964.

The waterfront around the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges was crowded with ships in 1924.

Union Square, one of the greatest public spaces in the world, was laid out in 1832 and rebuilt in 1882. It was looking pretty bare in 1924.
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Happy New Year, party people! So what’s the deal, is it two thousand ten, or twenty-ten? I’m really on the fence about this, myself. At first I was an adamant twenty-ten person, but I’m coming around on two thousand ten. Arguments for consistency could be made for both, but I think I just like the sound of two thousand ten better… the tempo is more pleasing to me, feels more complete than the alliterative hop-skip-jump of twenty-ten.

Anyway, today I am following up on my threat promise to write an entry about programming basics for designers. This is the first of what will be… oh, I don’t know, three or four posts, and if they get a good response, I’ll write some more. All of these entries will assume that you have no prior knowledge of programming and hence are suitable for absolute beginners, but also won’t be completely useless to those of you with a passing knowledge of the subject.

These aren’t tutorials. I’m not here to teach you how to make your own website or write an iPhone app, and I’m not going to tell you the specific syntax for how to make text italic or change the sizes of your headers. My intention is simply to introduce the basic concepts of programming to those of you who are interested in or would benefit from learning them.

Personally, I think that everyone could benefit from learning at least the basics of programming. Programming as a practice is an effective and creative way to learn critical thinking, organization, problem-solving, and planning techniques. It will change the way you think — for the better. But even if you never end up learning how to program, I hope that these posts will at least help you understand what programmers are doing when we spend the entire day typing what looks like complete nonsense, and why things that may seem simple to you are sometimes very difficult to implement.
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