“Amy Wang’s graduate thesis project, Ametrica!, was recently honored as a winner in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. Amy is a recent graduate from the School of Visual Arts MFA Designer as Author program. She discusses her process of discover and her intention to spread the message that the U.S. should adopt the metric system.” (Thanks On Paper Wings!)

Noah Iliinsky: “My master’s thesis is a system for creating good diagrams. It starts with the basics of perception and cognition, and walks the reader through the process of making appropriate choices for their particular design problem.”

“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 emerging field of visualization studies examines the use of pictures to improve the access to information, the quality of software, or the communication of knowledge. Prominent research fields in this area are information visualization (a domain of computer science), scientific visualization, or software visualization. Other highly relevant research sectors for the understanding of pictures in communication are design studies and the psychology of perception.”

“I’m Enrico Bertini a postdoc researcher at the Departement of Informatics at University of Fribourg, Switzerland. My research activity focuses mainly on Information Visualization, that is, graphical interactive interfaces to access complex and/or large volume information to extract knowledge and support the formation and assessment of hypothesis.”

“Data presentation can be both beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approached to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?”

“I spent the weekend building a new style for Shaun Inman’s Mint 2 called Tufte Mint. The inspiration and namesake of the style was Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information—a fantastic book that chronicles the history and theory of data graphics.

Tufte Mint’s design is focused on maximizing data-ink and minimizing chartjunk and decoration. The graphs in particular have been designed in a style Tufte presents in his book. Keep reading for more info on the design and to grab the free download.”

“At a conference recently, I heard Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits talk about inspiration. He showed a bunch of different techniques he uses, including how he uses Photoshop’s mosaic filter on an image to blow up giant pixels representing the basic colors in the picture. He uses those as pallets for the design work he does. Very cool.

Inspiration can come from process, but it can also come from the most unexpected places. For example, when we were designing the data-over-time visualizations for Google Analytics, we were totally stuck with bar graphs. We’d iterated dozens of times, scoured the web for examples to steal, and had tried just about everything. The result felt muddy and chartjunked…”

“Grid-it notepads are a series of notepads based on the layout grids of famous publications: ‘By moving the grids from the backround to the foreground, and divorcing them from their content, we pay homage as well as render the invisible visible.’”

“Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998. Her work is smart, finely detailed, elegant, witty, inventive, informative. A fierce researcher and reporter, she writes gracefully and precisely. Megan has the soul of a news reporter, who happens to use graphs, tables, and illustrations–as well as words–to explain the news. Her best work is the best work in news graphics.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“One of my favorite Woody Allen quips from his tragically short period as a stand-up comic is the punch line to his hyperbolic story about taking a speed-reading course and then digesting all of War and Peace in twenty minutes. The audience begins to giggle at the silliness of reading Tolstoy’s massive tome in a brief sitting. Allen then kills them with his summary of the book: ‘It’s about Russia.’ The joke came to mind recently as I read the self-congratulatory blog post by IBM’s Many Eyes visualization project, applauding their first month on the web. (And I’m feeling a little embarrassed by my post on the one-year anniversary of this blog.) The Many Eyes researchers point to successes such as this groundbreaking visualization of the New Testament… when I see visualizations like this one, the lesson is clear: Make sure your visualizations expose something new, hidden, non-obvious.” (Thanks db79!)

“The current vogue for less-is-more minimalism, for ample white space, is traceable in part to Tufte, especially when it comes to a certain maker of MP3 players. In fact, when I ask him whom he’s never worked for but would like to, he leans in and says, “A-P-P-L-E! [But] they don’t need any help.”

The lovefest appears to be requited. In press photos of the iPhone, the device displays a New York Times Web front page on its screen. And that page contains a tiny ad for Beautiful Evidence, one that ran on the Times site for exactly one Sunday. Tufte thinks the cameo was a lucky break. I have no doubt that it’s an anonymous Apple designer’s thank-you note.”

“From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful.” (Thanks Mapping-news.com!)

“The graphic portrayal of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, which are intertwined with each other. They also connect with the rise of statistical thinking up through the 19th century, and developments in technology into the 20th century. From above ground, we can see the current fruit; we must look below to see its pedigree and germination. There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.”

You’ve already seen this, but I’ve been out sick so I’m posting it anyway. This is a really slick Flash interface that displays the scale of just about everything. From humans to plants, chromosomes to trees, mountains to dogs. Nice.