Intended as a forceful wake-up call for Iowa educators, the video stresses the importance of an educational approach that moves away from “low-level mental work” and towards stronger development in critical thinking and problem solving.

We knew we needed the look of “Iowa, Did You Know? to respect the serious tone of the content — and also create a sense of urgency. To do this, we minimized the color palette and illustrated in a simple, flat style. We found ourselves inspired by letterpress and silkscreen posters — they always seem to convey such personality and immediacy. This is true for both modern band posters and things like historic FSA and political posters.

To help strike a contrast between Iowa and the world, the Iowa scenes have an earth-toned color palette as well as a burlap texture. This makes them feel somewhat analog and vintage. Anything related to the outside world or new technologies received a brighter, cleaner color palette that is more vivid and energized. We used Thirstype’s Apex typeface to bring an academic feel and a look that meshes with IowaFuture.org’s branding.

XPLANE previously worked with Dr. McLeod and Karl Fisch on the educational “Did You Know? 2.0” video in 2007. We collaborated again in 2009, this time including The Economist, on “Did You Know? 4.0” which focused on media convergence and technology. These videos have more than 7 million views on YouTube.

The “Iowa, Did You Know” content was developed by Dr. McLeod, with all storyboarding, design, and animation by XPLANE | Dachis Group.

Tell us what you think!

Update, August 5, 2011: Here’s Scott McLeod’s blog post with more info about the piece and the series.

As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.

We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.

The idea for a history-themed VTS came from discussions at home (full disclosure: I’m married to an XPLANE designer) about how I was — and was not — using the chalkboard in my classroom. Chalkboards and whiteboards are ubiquitous in education, yet there’s precious little attention to how college educators like myself should use them. I never thought much about what I was capturing on the board until a colleague pointed out that a student writing only what was on the board would have a poor grasp of that day’s rich discussion. The board was basically a list of nouns in no particular order with a few pathetic arrows. Clearly, there was room for improvement. But I went into history because I loved stories and words, not drawing. And I’ve always been a little self-conscious of my stickman presidents and maps of the United States with Maine the size of South America. And with PowerPoint or Keynote slides available to present pre-planned material, there are even fewer opportunities to capture ideas visually in real time in front of a classroom.

Enter VTS. During the session, we divided into two groups and everyone live-sketched while my colleague Buddy Paulett and I discussed a tricky historical topic. I explained why St. Louis lost so much population in the twentieth century and Buddy covered the origins of the French and Indian War. The resulting visuals were great. When presented with a brief lecture by the person who sketched, they quickly tell a complex historical story.

Here’s one of the sketches describing St. Louis’ 20th century population loss. See more sketches of this and the French and Indian War in our Flickr VTS set. Each of these was drawn live over the course of 20-30 minutes while listening to guest historians speak.

The takeaway for me was that live sketching, cartooning, and creative doodling are all useful tools to communicate complex stories. I’m not going to stop using words, but I’d like to add more visual skills to my toolkit. So I’m going to try to implement a few new things this year:

1. Develop a small icon set that I can draw quickly and effectively in real time during class. For a modern U.S. historian teaching in the St. Louis region, this might include the outline of the U.S., outlines of Illinois and Missouri, the St. Louis skyline (thank you, Arch!), a two-dimensional factory, a car or truck, a person holding a picket sign, etc
2. Spend a few minutes planning how the board will evolve during a class session. As a writer, I tend to start at the left and move to the right but live sketching seems to work better if I start in the middle and grow from there.
3. Encourage students to capture class notes via drawing. I’m still not sure how this could work, but I like the idea that artistically-inclined students could sketch their notes and somehow share them with the class. Doing this might encourage more creative students to see history as stories to be communicated rather than lists of names and dates.

Baby steps for now, but we’ll see where they lead.

XPLANE teamed with Kronos, a global leader in workforce management, to create new video to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. It’s a visual homage to women and how their role in the workforce has changed throughout history, making all of our lives exponentially easier, safer and more productive.

Do you know who Melitta Bentz was? Or Ida Forbes? Or Ruth Wakefield? No? Then watch and learn.

This four and a half minute video is the third in an ongoing series. View the first two at the links below and learn more about the day here.

• How will you manage?
• How will your week work?

The David Rumsey Map Collection has now been online for ten years. [This] selection of carto-curios is from the latest batch of material uploaded to the site.

Rumsey is an internet hero of the first order. Following the success of his business he was able to afford to indulge his latent interest for all things cartographic and he assembled a massive collection of more than 150,000 items.

That might have been the end of the story: rich dude spends money on secret passion in obscurity. But Rumsey wanted to share his collection with the world and mere donation of his maps and atlases to a document repository didn’t seem like it would fully satisfy his magnanimous urges. From a five year old interview on SFGate: “I realized that whichever institution I gave it to would lock it away, put it on a shelf,” he says, with mild indignation. “But just then the technology came along that would enable me to put it all up online, and it was obvious that this was the best way I could give it away to the public.”

As Garr Reynolds mentions over at Presentation Zen this morning, yes, this project was created with “off-the-shelf slideware” (Keynote and GarageBand, actually, along with Photoshop and Illustrator). Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.

For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit The Economist’s Media Convergence conference site at mediaconvergence.economist.com, or stop by shifthappens.wikispaces.com for all things Did You Know.

Works of art in and of themselves, these ancient maps reveal a great deal more than the geographical knowledge of our ancestors. They tell stories of war and triumph, reveal myths and biases, and document modes of thought that have long been obsolete.

According to the records of the General Organization of Development labs (GOD) it took a mere six days to manufacture a fully-operational universe, complete with day, night, flora and fauna, and installing Adam as its manager to oversee daily functions on Earth.

That’s one story.

If thou shalt believe the Book of Darwin, t’is five billion years after The Big Bang that we behold what the cosmos hath begat; the magma, the terra firma, the creeping beats, and mankind, whose dolorous and chaotic evolution begat the gift of consciousness.

Duelity is a split-screen animation that tells both sides of the story of Earth’s origins in a dizzying and provocative journey through the history and language that marks human thought.

As you might expect, the book features eclectic and rare book illustrations derived from many digital repositories, accompanied by some background commentary. It is not simply a regurgitation of what is here in the archives, although about two thirds of the images have appeared on the site previously.”