“An experiment to exploit the single frames that make up an animated film and explore the emotions of the creative process. Created with 987 Polaroids and no computer compositing. By Jordan C Greenhalgh.”

“The below image looks like a simple gradient with my website’s name on it. But it’s more than that. There’s a picture hidden in that gradient. Can you find it?”

“Checking out the New York Times’s infographic on the housing bubble, I thought ‘wow! Look at how much prices climbed!’. Then I read the fine print and realized they’ve completely distorted the vertical scale to make the increase look enormous.”

“The above image tracks the front page of latimes.com from 2002 through 2006, illustrating how quickly online presence can evolve. Note how the page structure and hierarchy have changed as images (yellow) and advertising (orange) have gradually become integrated with editorial content (blue). However, the manner in which information and links are collaged across a page (or interconnected through a database) is emblematic of a deeper organizational problem with the way that newspapers have dealt with digital content.”

“Cartographies of Imagination, by me, Sarah B. Nelson, is about navigating the world of collaboration, through methods, tools, techniques and ideas. I’ll share methods, tools, and ideas to inspire you to draw on the collective wisdom around you. I’m an interaction designer and design strategist at Adaptive Path.”

UPDATE: Early registration has been extended to 24 Oct to allow our corporate customers enough time to get budget approval!

VizThink is a visual thinking conference and XPLANE is proud to be part of it. It happens Jan 27-29 in San Francisco and these are just some of the folks lined up to speak and facilitate:

Scott McCloud
Nigel Holmes
Christine Martells
Neil Cohn
Nancy Duarte
David Sibbet
Eileen Clegg
Robert Horn
Stephen Few
Dave Gray
Karl Gude
Dan Rose

Who are visual thinkers? Visual thinkers are people who use graphic design, images, pictures, video, animations, sketches, and other forms of visual art for communications and learning. VizThink will bring together several hundred participants from the best of the best in our industry with participation by trainers, marketers, presenters, executives, planners, strategists, and managers, just to name a few. While each approach may be different, the attendees all share the same philosophy in the power of visualization for learning and communication. We believe that by bringing these diverse groups together, we’ll create a community that can take the industry to a new level and invite you to take part.

Take advantage of the early registration discount by heading over to VizThink.com now!

“Graphicology is the continuing education of a mulitdisciplinary designer. Here, you’ll find resources, inspiration, current events and material that challenges what it means to be a strategic & creative communicator in today’s world. Art directors, graphic designers, engineers, photographers, typographers, writers, producers, cinematographers and others are encouraged to comment and check in regularly.”

“…if you are working on an engraving, you will probably find there are a lot of grey areas where the lines were close together. Assuming you used at least 1200dpi for the scan, and preferably 1600 or 2400, there should be at least four or five pixels between the lines, which should be at least two or three pixels wide…”

“Data charts and diagrams are used when statistical data has to be presented in the most convenient and usable way. Visual charts are clear, visually appealing and easier to perceive than some simple enumerations or tables — mainly because users don’t have to analyze the meaning of presented facts, but can perceive main tendencies through the visual weight of the facts — directly.

You can create charts in graphic editors or use special applications (software or web-apps) which can help you to create your charts in few minutes. However, once you’d like to update an old chart, or create a new one, you have to run the application and create new images over and over again. That’s not flexible. Or maybe you just want to offer your visitors not a simple image, but a powerful dynamic chart.”

“For our special 50th issue we asked 50 of the most influential architects, designers and thinkers to tell us what they believe in.”

“Web minimalism has come back as a trend in the summer of 2007. Rainfall Daffinson adores the concept of minimalism, zen culture and the essence of things. We chose 24 moments of minimalism web interface design in the last decade, selected several quotes to easily define the minimalism and represent some of the best new minimalism websites.”

“Anybody who listens to the BBC’s online radio service will have noticed that their brands have been up-dated. This post is a quick review of what they’ve done and an assessment of if it works.

I find that brand portfolios are always a tricky subject. You find that with any large organization who develop a brand portfolio that they normally start off with little or no regard for the over-all styling in regard to each other. New products or services (shall we call them ‘ventures’) develop as a law unto themselves.

Suddenly, one day a marketing manager wakes up and realizes that the umbrella brand identity (in this example the ‘bbc brand’) seems alien to its children. Then steps are made to bring the portfolio into line so that a consistent style is met across all of them.” (Thanks Monoscope!)

“Maybe someone can explain this to me. On the one hand, there are frequent complaints in the fine-art photo community about the (perceived) poor quality of the photography over at Flickr. On the other hand, ‘vernacular photography’ (the kind of stuff that people would have put up on Flickr — had it existed fifty years ago) is becoming ever more popular. I must be missing something.”

Hey! It’s back! September 28! Shaun Inman vs Kevin Cornell! Coudal’s Photoshop Tennis returns as Layer Tennis with Adobe as a sponsor — and I love that ad, btw. Wonder if they’ll repost the old archives someday (I was lucky enough to play in the 4th match of the original set of games back in 2001).

Starting in just two weeks we’ll be hosting a series of live design events on Friday afternoons called Layer Tennis. We originally called the game “Photoshop Tennis” but these days there are a ton more tools that can be used alone and in combination to create things and we wanted to open these games up to millions of new possibilities.

“Let’s be plain about it: Design is business. We can’t go on with suspicious…accountability. Designers, who excel at making hard things easy to understand through an interface, need to be part of the business discussion. Giving them Word docs and telling them to “make it look good” won’t cut it anymore. There is no accountability there, and worse, at that point much of the potential for really giving users what they need is already lost. If the Word doc is garbage, then no matter what the designer does will fail. Garbage in, garbage out. The scope of possibility is cut down to a narrow fraction of what it could be…of what the designer could come up with if they only had some time to think about how the strategy affects the design. As Peter Merholz says: Experience is the product.”