Changing Tides

• 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.

• NodeBox | Home
  NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented.
  (tags: visualization python)
• Avogadro - Molecular Editor
  Avogadro is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.
  (tags: chemistry visualization python)

Cockatoos
Originally uploaded by bmoon

Cockatoos feeding in the rain.

• SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software
  SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software.
  Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab