Changing Tides

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently collaborating with Eleanor Gates-Stuart and Barry Moon. We’ve setup a website for our project -  m o o n s t u a r t   - at moonstuart.net.

We’re showing an installation called boidSong in the “Inspired” art exhibition at The Front Gallery in Lyneham from the 20th-25th August as part of National Science Week.  

The opening is at 8pm on Wednesday 20th August. 

Today I reorganised my Processing source code directory. I had mixed lots of examples from other people in with my projects.

I thought that everything needed to be in the main Processing directory, but I’ve realised that the Processing IDE is clever enough to work with sub-directories. So I’ve moved all the sample code into some ‘examples’ directories.

I used the ‘Versions’ SVN client for Mac (http://versionsapp.com) to move everything around in my repository and then update my local copy. It was very easy - even though I can still only use my right hand.

‘Versions’ has the clearest user interface of the SVN clients that I’ve tried, it makes using SVN very easy and quick.

Thanks to everyone from CPAS for your support and the flowers!

My elbow with the screws holding it back together:

• Gerd Arntz - Isotype signs
  Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, which symbolized key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy, for the visual language Isotype.
  (tags: visualization symbols)

The Gerd Arntz Web Archive has over 600 examples of Isotype symbols designed by him:

The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy.

This is his symbol for a scientist:

The Isotype visual dictionary was created using linocut images hand printed onto paper.  These have been scanned and the backgrounds corrected to white from the original brown or brownish paper.

(Found via Randy Krum writing about Gerd Arntz today).

• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
  Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
  (tags: visualization typography)

I had a play with it using the text from the Wikipedia page about Visualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visualization_(graphic)):

Click on the image to go to the Wordle website for the full sized version.

It was fun to play with the presentation options, and the results are decorative, but I’m not sure how useful they are in conveying information.

Is that a berry, or an eye watching you pass by?

Today the SmashingMagazine announced that it has won the ‘Most Valuable Design Website’ category at Webinale 2008.  The magazines chief editor, Vitaly Freidman, gave a talk and has made the slides available on the SmashingMagazine freebies page (at the bottom):

On May 26-28 Vitaly Friedman, the chief-editor of Smashing Magazine, was in Karlsruhe attending the event. He has also given a talk “Designtrends 2008: What’s Next?”. You can download the slides of the talk below. 

Designtrends 2008: What’s Next? covers current trends in web-development and examples of modern web-design (.pdf, 10 Mb)

They give an interesting snapshot of current trends in web design.