Hand-Cut Street Maps of World Cities

The movie Logorama [logorama-themovie.com] is a 17-minute animated film made by the French collectibe H5. The film depicts events in a stylized Los Angeles, and is told entirely through the use of more than 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and mascots. The film won the Prix Kodak at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 82nd Academy Awards.

Logorama explores the extent to which logos are embedded in our daily existence. “Logorama presents us with an over-marketed world built only from logos and real trademarks that are destroyed by a series of natural disasters (beginning with a hurricane, cyclone, tidal wave…). Logotypes are used to describe an alarming universe (similar to the one that we are living in) with all the graphic signs that accompany us everyday in our lives. This over-organized universe is violently transformed by the cataclysm becoming fantastic and absurd. it shows the victory of the creative against the rational, where nature and human fantasy triumph.“

Watch a short snippet of the movie below.

See also All my Faves and All the Logos. Via Under Consideration. Also at Design Boom and Wikipedia.

The always surprising and refreshing Abstract City blog at New York Times Online, which regularly features visual pearls like New York in Lego and Subway Map Bathroom Tiling, has just posted a nice collection of graphical depictions [niemann.blogs.nytimes.com] that mimic the visual style of Google Maps. However, where I first assumed they were real outtakes or crops without any major alterations, some, if not all, seem to be newly created. On each image, the captions have been changed so they are interpreted as information graphics instead of geographical maps.

Clavilux 2000 [jonasheuer.de] is a subtle music visualization installation that represents the playing of sounds by way of a simultaneous animation that can be interpreted.

For every note played on the keyboard, a stripe appears of which the dimensions, position and color correspond to the way the particular key was stroke. The length and vertical position of stripe is mapped unto the velocity, while the stripe’s width reflects the length of each note. By mapping the color wheel on the circle of 5ths, the colors give the viewer (and listener) an impression of the harmonic relations. Notes belonging to one specific tonality correspond to colors from one specific area of the color wheel. Therefore each key has its own color scheme and “wrong” notes stand out in contrasting colors. The more different tonalities a music piece has, the more colorful the resulting visualization will be.

As all the stripes do not disappear, the resulting representation is able to convey insights about the composition as well as the specific performance: Which notes were played the most? Which were the loudest notes? Which range of the keys was played mostly? How harmonically constant was the music?

Watch the visualization in action below.

Sam Loman [just-sam.com] created an original take on illustrating the inner structure and workings of the human body as the tight intertwining of different systems (e.g. arterial, digestive, musculetal, respiratory, etc.), by way of a subway map metaphor.

The full size version is available below (by courtesy of Vizworld).

See also Animals on the Underground, Subway Map Bathroom Tiling, Redesigned NY Subway Map, Subway-Style Trend Maps, and Time-Based Subway Map.

Via Vizworld and Gizmodo.

Thnkx Peter!

Plasma [moebio.com] is an interactive network (or should we say “animated heatmap”?) of links and tags that acts as a visualization experiment to inform ongoing research on aids. It takes an integral and holistic point of view of integrating any possible issue into a single visual map.

Each initiation seems to start from another (random?) set of keywords, so sometimes it is worth to reload the page or select individual tags to experience the potential of animating a network view by highlighting relative proximity instead of direct connectivity (edges).

Via Visual Complexity.

As a seemingly out-of-the-box creative solution to an essay assignment, this enthusiastic student successfully combined 2 of her favorite things: “being a nerd” and “dancing”. In practice, she takes on the challenge to “dance” several data visualization techniques, including a line graph, scatter plot, box and whisker plot, pie graph, bar graph, sin and cos graph and csc graph. Luckily she put it on YouTube for all to see…

Watch the movie below.

If you appreciate the combination of dancing with infographics, be sure not to miss Protein Synthesis People Chains. You can also check out Typographic Reinterpretation of Cunningham’s Dancing Hands.

Via Krees.

UPDATE: Some background to this video at NYTimes, Boston Globe and ABC (found at Flowing Data).

luscious [hint.fm] is an attempt to distill the visions of fashion designers and photographers, those who compose rousing images of light and color that fill the pages of glossy magazines, into poetic abstract compositions.

To create the images in luscious, information designers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas began with a series of magazine advertisements for luxury brands. They then used a custom algorithm designed to extract “peak” colors from these picture. A random arrangement of concentric circles fills the plane, representing the essential colors of each region. The resulting image hides context and representation and lets the viewer concentrate on pure color.

More information is also available on their project page.

Everyone Ever in the World [theluxuryofprotest.com] is a poster depicting the number of people to have lived versus been killed in wars, massacres and genocide during the recorded history of humankind. The resulting visualization, printed in transparent ink, uses existing paper area and paper loss (die cut circle) to represent the concepts of life and death respectively. The sequence of dots to the top left of the graph shows the dramatic increase in the number of conflicts over the past 5 millennia (left to right : 3000 BCE to 2000 CE) with the most recent 1000 years being the most violent. The large dot below the graph represents the 1000 years to come : a predicted startling increase in human conflict.

The total number of people to have lived was estimated through exponential regression calculations based on historical census data and known biological birth rates. This results in approximately 77.6 billion human beings to have ever lived during the recorded history of humankind. The total people killed in conflicts was collated from a number of historical source books and was summed for all conflicts – approximately 969 million people killed, or ~1.25% of all the people to have ever lived. The timescale encompasses 3200 BCE to 2009 CE – a period of over 5 millennia, and 1100+ conflicts of recorded human history.

The poster is for sale at Counter Objects.

As an avid infosthetics subscriber, you definitely should be the proud owner of the book “Data Flow“. Why? Well, the book is (sometimes uncomfortably…) closely related to most of the content that is featured here on this website. In addition, it also adds some thick, glossy paper and an impressive high-definition image resolution that makes any visualization enthusiast drool.

Based on the success of the first book, the publisher will very soon be releasing the book’s successor, aptly titled “Data Flow 2“. In fact, according to the latest information, the official release is expected any day now.

You might wonder: How does the book look like inside? What is the difference between the two books? Would Tufte like it? And how did the editors decide which project to accept, and which one not?

If you really want to know these things and more, you can check out a sneak preview of the book’s content, and read an interview with Sven Ehmann, one of the 4 editors, here after the break.

As an avid infosthetics subscriber, you definitely should be the proud owner of the book “Data Flow“. Why? Well, the book is (sometimes uncomfortably…) closely related to most of the content that is featured here on this website. In addition, it also adds some thick, glossy paper and an impressive high-definition image resolution that makes any visualization enthusiast drool.

Based on the success of the first book, the publisher will very soon be releasing the book’s successor, aptly titled “Data Flow 2“. In fact, according to the latest information, the official release is expected any day now.

You might wonder: How does the book look like inside? What is the difference between the two books? Would Tufte like it? And how did the editors decide which project to accept, and which one not?

If you really want to know these things and more, you can check out a sneak preview of the book’s content, and read an interview with Sven Ehmann, one of the 4 editors, here after the break.