Congrats to the VizThink team on their one-year anniversary!

“As you may have noticed in our earlier post today, June 25th is VizThink’s one-year anniversary. One of the questions we get most often is, “How did VizThink get started?”. So, we thought this might be a good time to re-tell that story…”

Famed newspaper (re)designer Mario García launched a blog last month: “A blog about storytelling, design, the projects we work on, the things we learn along the way.”

“Yesterday, while the humidity in New York grew to more than an inch thick, Bryony and I had the pleasure of spending the day inside the Herb Lubalin Study Center (HLSC) in famed Cooper Union. Founded in 1985 — and first curated by Ellen Lupton until 1992, and now headed by Mike Essl and Emily Roz — the HLSC houses one of the most impressive (and one of the few accessible) collections of graphic design work from the twentieth century.”

Check out this new XPLANATiON that XPLANE put together:

“Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money — by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks.”

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Derek Powazek: “For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine — real, live printed magazine — with no giant pile.”

“Coudal Partners started as a traditional ad agency. Then Jim and Co. morphed it into something else: a multidisciplinary design consultancy that does everything from running an ad network to creating consumer products to cultivating a vibrant community of creative types. We caught up with innovator at the Seed Conference, a design and entrepreneurship pow-wow he helped found. Here he discusses Coudal’s business model and popular blog.”

“Ideas. They’re at the heart of every creative process. However, almost no really good ideas are flashes of inspiration. They may start that way—a single glimmer of something special—but in order to work, they need to be honed. Like a really good cheese, they need to mature. Indeed, the ‘flash of inspiration’ idea—the Eureka moment—is only part of a longer process that, if ignored, will see most ideas simply fizzle out.

So, how do you ‘have’ ideas? Sit about and wait for them to pop into your head? If only most of us had the luxury to do so. No, for most of us, ideas have to be squeezed out of us every day. To stand up to this challenge, you need to arm yourself with some good tools.”

“If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.

Working with bad projects or bad clients generally boils down to mismatched expectations and inadequate communication. Your best safeguard is to make sure you and your client are on the same page before any work has even begun using a Terms of Service Agreement, which essentially puts into clear, written language what you expect from your client and what they should expect from you.”

“A Wayfinding system incorporates branding, signs, maps and directional devices that tell us where we are, where we want to go, and how to get there. An effective wayfinding system can add an important dimension to the image of a museum, a transit system, an airport, an office building, or an entire city. It can be designed as a savvy helper that gives information and direction to people in a clear, appropriate, user friendly way, to assist them in finding their way into, through, and out of an environment.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

“Graph visualization is a way to discover and visualize structures in complex relations. What sort of structures are people who do large scale computation studying? We can get a glimpse by visualizing the thousands of sparse matrices submitted to the University of Florida Sparse Matrix collection. The resulting gallery contains the drawing of graphs as represented by 1890 sparse matrices in this collection. Each of these sparse matrices (for rectangular matrix, an augmented matrix is formed first) is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, and is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm.”

“With the publication of his first book in 1962 at the age of 26, RSW began the singular passion of his life: making information understandable. He chaired the International Design in Aspen in 1972, the first Federal Design Assembly in 1973, followed by the National AIA Convention in 1976, before creating and chairing TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design) conferences from 1984-2002. He is the current Chair of the TEDMED Conferences. A B.Arch and M.Arch 1959 graduate with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Wurman’s nearly half-century of achievements includes the publication of his best-selling book Information Anxiety and his award winning ACCESS Travel Guides. Each of his 81 books focus on some subject or idea that he personally had difficulty understanding.”

“In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat ive self.”

“The invited lecturer, Yuri Engelhardt, started his speech by talking about the presence and importance of graphic representations throughout the history of the human been. Diagrams, maps, charts and many kind of symbols take part of our daily life. From clock faces to traffic signs or subway maps, or even those graphics that can be found in the neswspapers, they are everywhere around us. Computers deserve a special mention, where most information is transmitted to the user through graphic representation.”

“It was gorgeous. It was abstract. It was criticized. It was confusing. And it’s back.

With its 45- and 90-degree angles and one color per subway line, the 1972 subway map by Massimo Vignelli was divorced from the cityscape, devoid of street or neighborhood names. It was criticized because its water was not blue and its parks were not green. Paul Goldberger called it “a stunningly handsome abstraction” that “bears little relation to the city itself.”

Now Men’s Vogue has asked Mr. Vignelli to update his subway map for the May design issue.” (Thanks Information Design Watch!)

“Planning for VizThink Europe ‘08 is well underway. The event will be held October 12 - 14 at the Crowne Plaza in Berlin, Germany. For future events, we’ve decided to open up the Call for Facilitators to the community. This is your chance to be one of the facilitators at an upcoming VizThink conference. Are you a visual thinker? Do you have experiences and expertise you’d like to share? Can you teach others new techniques and ideas? Then being a VizThink facilitator is for you!”