Former XPLANER Brian Kaas is the big winner in the TAL t-shirt contest. Yay Brian!

A big thanks to the hundreds and hundreds of people who entered our recent T-Shirt design contest! We were incredibly impressed by the designs.

And the winner is… Brian Kaas of San Francisco, CA! His very elegant radio design seemed perfect for the next TAL pledge drive thank you gift.

A slideshow at Slate: “How artists are mining data sets to make you see the unseen…. Display an unwieldy mass of data in clever visual form and you may gain über-insight into questions you hadn’t yet put into words. That is the promise of information visualization, infoviz for short. The field has long helped scientists, engineers, and businesspeople see the unseen as it emerges from complex data: Users may spot promising molecules for pharmaceutical testing, for instance, or pinpoint glitches in a supply chain. As infoviz has matured, it has also caught fire as an art form, its center of gravity edging further from the pragmatic and closer to the expressive or the whimsically profound.”

Hey xBlog readers, if you want, you could go vote for this panel to be part of next year’s SXSW :-)

Shift Happens: Moving from Words to Pictures | People are hardwired for visualization yet we rely significantly on text. Most games, graphic novels, magazines, interfaces, IKEA instructions, and many other forms of communication take advantage of people’s natural visual thinking ability. Panelists will discuss how to leverage visual techniques to improve your games, websites, movies, communications, or presentations.

The panel is scheduled to include Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin; Dave Gray, founder and Chairman of XPLANE; Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft (authors of the wildly popular “In Plain English” podcast series); and expert visual facilitators and Austin natives Sunni Brown and Marilyn Martin.

Awesomeness from Merlin Mann: “’Making Time to Make’ is a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work. It’s designed to help you firewall the time and attention you need to get out of the lite communication business and into your studio.”

“With so many good teachers out there, it’s fortunate they can share their knowledge via video on the Internet. From the funny to the poignant, these glimpses into the lives of teachers and their students will keep you entertained while learning a little something as well. Whether you are a new teacher storing up tips and tricks or an experienced teacher who could just use a fresh perspective, you are sure to find something helpful among these videos.”

“Last night several dozen of us convened at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley to discuss the future of the book. Everyone came armed with passion, questions, and issues about books. More than half the group were published authors, so we were personally invested in the future of publishing. The opening self-introductions became so engrossing that I was tempted to declare the session an un-meeting and throw away Clark’s and my loose script for the evening.”

A creative and innovative approach to problem solving: Statistical surveys have shown that design and visualisation have a verifiable impact on business performance. Visual articulation is important when solving a problem that involves strategic goals and initiatives. At its core, it helps bridge the problem or opportunity with the solution. That is why helping decision makers to think and express themselves visually gives organisations a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Facilitators for the September 30, 2008 London workshop include Pablo M. Ramírez, Client Services Director of XPLANE EMEA and Martin Hill, VP Marketing EMEA for Lawson Software.

• Understand the meaning and value of visual thinking
• Use a creative and innovative method to solve business challenges
• Use visual tools to help you generate, evaluate and organise ideas
• Learn how to use them to contextualise, prioritise and harness change
• Extend these new techniques and methodology to your team

Go to www.xplane.com/events to download the registration forms and get more info.

“If there was ever an illustration with my name on it, it was this one I did for the Riverfront Times talking about this upcoming event at the St. Louis History Museum. James Eads + Ulysses S. Grant + Civil War Ironclad battleships = LET’S GO!!!”

“Inform. Inspire. Persuade. It’s the essence of presenting, but how well do you execute? Slide:ology, written by the world’s leading presentation design firm, contains the insights as well as the tips and tricks that have transformed countless speakers over the past 20 years.”

“Last month’s posts about the ¶ and the ß prompted a flurry of e-mail inquiring about other special favorites in the character set. Matt McInerney guessed correctly that the ampersand is one for which we have special affection, and asked if there was anything else we could say about it. How could we not? Ampersand, after all, is H&FJ’s middle name.”