“We’re roommates. We make call-and-response baroque scenes on a dry erase board. They usually have nerdy characters from nerdy things in them. We’re Pat Barrett and Todd McArthur.” (Thanks Drawn!)

So… here’s my muxtape.

Like ffffound (for the rest of us): “We Heart It is a social bookmarking tool for images and videos. We see many great images on blogs and websites around, and now you can put everything you saw and liked on the same page to look again whenever you want.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

Web page for Prof. Nancy Van House’s course at Berkeley: “This course brings together several approaches to visual media, with two goals: first, to use the resources of a variety of fields to understand (and perhaps anticipate) changes in the production and uses of personal photographic images (loosely defined); second, to examine the possibilities of multi-disciplinary approaches to new media and new technology. Our organizing topic will be personal photography, but that will be the springboard for discussions about new media and developing information technologies and ways of understanding them.”

“There is no way to accurately put a value on blogs and blogging companies. All are privately-held and, as is true with many content businesses, the value of the company is based on what a buyer will pay. The figures we have put together look at advertising revenue and income from related businesses like conferences. We have not included blogs affiliated with larger media companies.”

“Are you a visual thinker? Do you want to hone your visual thinking skills? Do you want to learn from some of the best in our industry? Then the Visual Thinking Workshop is for you! VizThink is offering a series of one-day workshops all around the United States. These workshops will help you improve your visual thinking skills. The first workshop series will be run by Dave Gray and Karl Gude.

Apparently separated at birth, together they will show you how to visualize your ideas so you can think and communicate with greater clarity and effectiveness. Working individually and in small teams, you will learn and practice visualization techniques that have been successfully used to improve innovation and accelerate change at some of the world’s leading companies. After completing this workshop you will have a toolkit for thinking and presentation effectiveness — your presentations of complex information and strategies will never be the same.”

“What;’s your true type? What type do you click best with — and which types spell doom? In five quick questions, we’ll decipher your identity.” (Thanks Design Observer!)

“InDesign lets you control the visibility of layers in your placed Photoshop graphics. That can be pretty handy when you find yourself designing a series of related ads that require minor changes to the same image.

In InDesign, select a placed Photoshop graphic and choose Object > Object Layer Options. This gives you a dialog box where you can toggle the eyeball next to any layer to turn it on or off.”

This is awesome: “Video Demonstration of a work in relief filled with ingenuity: on each page deploy forms cut from paper. The book by Marion Battle is a lively primer in three colors: red, black and white. “

“At first I wasn’t too sure how to take the post from Slant Six Creative’s blog post stop taking advice. In the post it suggests that reading too many blogs will drive you crazy, and within that context DesignNotes is mentioned along with a couple others. There’s one maxim where no press is bad press, but I also was wondering after reading it if that means that there’s one less person about to read about my observations. So I deferred to a friend to find out what she thought. Thankfully she thought it was actually quite a good post. The thing that surprised me about the original post was the premise that I’m giving advice.”

“Wordpress 2.5’s interface overhaul is getting closer, and now that I’ve been able to play with the release candidate, these are my thoughts.

The official Wordpress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the Wordpress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.”

“Since the days of the caveman, we’ve been using information graphics or ‘infographics’, as visual shorthand to convey information to the viewer that might take paragraphs or pages to explain in words. We interact with infographics on a daily basis, from the stick figure telling us when to cross the street, to icons in a web navigational menu. The field of infographics is exploding, with Edward Tufte being the current leading expert. There are many great examples to be found, that run the gamut of information displayed…”

Two of our facilitators and one of our attendees from VizThink ‘08 were involved in a significant visualization effort for one of the most famous conferences in the world, TED. If you’re unfamiliar with TED, they choose a theme each year and then each presenter has 18 minutes (no more, no less) to present their story. The presentations are almost always impressive, and most certainly inspiring. One of the most famous TED presentations related to our field was one done by Hans Rosling in 2006.

Here’s a note from Tom Wujec who headed up this visualization effort at TED:

Dear VizThinkers:

As many of you will recall, at VizThink 2008, I extended an offer for a free ticket to TED to a graphic cartographer who had the talent and stamina to capture the ideas of over 50 TED presenters in 3 ½ days of meetings. It probably will not surprise you that the offer was extended to David Sibbit of the Grove Consultants International, one of the leaders in our industry. David and Kevin Richards, from Autodesk, made a herculean effort to create over 700 sketches which are now on-line in a 200 page pdf book as well as in several videos. If you’re interested in seeing this emerging variation of digital visual recording, please download the interactive pdf book as well as the videos that strive to capture the spirit of this year’s Big Ideas.

A list of winners from “the Oscars of information graphics” contest recently help in Pamplona. XPLANE took a bronze. Congrats, Ted, Taylor and Matt!

“Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best…”