Our minds are quick to convert new optical experiences into familiar stories, favored viewpoints, comforting metaphors. No wonder, for how else can we manage optical data flows of 10 MB per second without familiar categories for filing, without the rage for wanting to conclude?

An excerpt called "See Now… Words Later," from the Edward Tufte’s upcoming Seeing Around. Here’s a related link to Tufte’s sculptural work.

This infographic is notable from an information design perspective, too. It mixes text and graphics seamlessly (ha, seams, get it?) and uses time-shifting, focus, and abstraction to explain why Johan Santana’s changeup is so effective. Try making the same points with just text.

03santana_GFX.jpg (JPEG Image, 1125×1149 pixels)

A very special Sans Comic Sans shout-out to my hometown rag, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, which went above and beyond the call and used a special American flag masthead reminiscent of FOX News.

You should see what they do for Bastille Day.

It’s a small thing, but it bugs me that the colors on the Google Analytics Traffic Sources pie chart aren’t consistent across my different websites. For example, orange refers to direct traffic here:

…but when I look at the statistics for a different website, orange can refer to something different (in this case, traffic from search engines):

Communicating data at a glance is the primary responsibility of any dashboard. The inconsistent coding of colors on this graph makes me stop my glance and think. This makes me crabby on rainy Monday mornings after a long holiday weekend.

>:(

An interesting set of design ideas: http://www.portfolio.com/infographics/2007/06/terminals

I don’t have nearly enough domain knowledge to be able to make an intelligent—or even sarcastic!—remark about these three designs, but IDEO’s appeals the most to me for some reason. It’s probably the typography. Anyway, all three are interesting approaches to redesigning an old, complicated, and very important system used by experts.

Related links:

• What is a Bloomberg terminal?
• How to use the Bloomberg terminal, with screenshots
• Bloomberg Terminal (Wikipedia)

(Swiped from information aesthetics, via the IxDA mailing list.)

PowerPoint may be a step backward, but the backlash is under way (Google “PowerPoint is evil” if you disagree) and there is abundant evidence that Tufte’s work is rising out of the Flatland of academia. His first book called out the Times‘s lousy graphics; today, he says, the paper has some of the best. 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.”

A Tufte-Apple collaboration… the mind would boggle, except that everything would be so clear even to the most confused person.

I love big charts and graphs, and thebudgetgraph.com’s representation of where Congress allocates your tax dollars. The flash/preview of this poster is a little clunky but the only critique I’d levy at the poster is the way it handles micro versus macro comprisons. There’s a stat in the middle of the chart stating that 66% of the discrestionary funding goes to military and national security, while 33% goes to non-military programs (I didn’t realize military spending was that high!).

Spending is graphically indicated by the relative size of the bubbles, while this proves effective for comparisons within small regions of the chart, it makes it diffcult to translate across space. For example, our 66%/33% difference in military spending isn’t plainly obvious by simply glacing at the chart. In fact, one might think that the division was equal because military and non-military categories occupy the same amount of space on the poster (50/50). It would have been nice is the chart designers had made that division of spending visually forceful.

I like how the graph answers the basic question quickly. Just plug in your rent and the price of what you’d like to buy and it does the rest. The graph is customizable, of course, so you can fiddle around with a 20% down payment or different property tax rates if you like, but the graph is informative with a minimal amount of input from me.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

This post is in no way an endorsement of the Times Real Estate section, which can go to hell.

See those little trash can icons? When combined with an interesting stat about the clutter level of my subscriptions, the result is a convenient little user experience. So long, Chowhound Outer Boroughs! I’ve had enough of your pizza-debating feed.

The building outlines are cool, though I’m struggling at first glance to come up with a reason why I’d need that information. The UI designers who integrated the building data did a good job of keeping the building outlines subtle but noticeable. They don’t appear until you hit a certain zoom threshold, which makes sense both technologically and aesthetically. Most importantly, the building outlines don’t compete with the street outlines, which are the most important data on the map.

The subway stops are a cool addition. I use the onNYturf mashup frequently for the same information:

The two maps are very similar but I think I’ll continue to use the onNYturf mashup version for a couple of reasons.

Google Maps’ version lacks one important feature: I have to connect the dots to figure out if a certain line takes me where I want to go. onNYturf’s map does this for me (at the cost of obscuring some street names, which I almost always don’t care about). It also doesn’t indicate which entrances are actually a part of a single station (and thus a free transfer). The onNYturf map uses the MTA standard black line to indicate the Canal Street stop connects the NQRW, JMZ, and 6 lines. While this convention might be a little clumsy for the first-time rider, it works fine for anyone familiar with the MTA. The Google map doesn’t provide this information at all, giving the impression that there are three stations where there is only one.

Anyway, subway map design nerdery aside, it’s cool to see Google Maps incorporate some of the very useful features first developed by mashup authors.