Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0
iA is back with the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0, a gorgeous and fascinating information graphic that uses a slightly modified version of the Tokyo subway map to plot the 20 most successful websites according to category, proximity, success, popularity, and perspective.
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The Web Trend Map is available as a free download in various sizes and a free printable A3 pdf. You can also purchase it as a poster for $25.
iA, a Japan-based design agency, uses the map to help position clients' internet strategy. I think it's just plain fasscinating to follow the various subway lines and see the stops along the way. The Social News (Green) line for instance runs from Digg through Netvibes, Wordpress, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine, before connecting with the News (Light Green) line at OhMyNews and continuing through Beppe Grillo (an Italian lanuage blog), The Washington Post, and onward...
Also interesting are the prognoses iA gives the various sites (in the form of weather forcasting graphics) and the places where the various lines intersect.
Great for desktop wallpaper or just pin it to your cube wall (as I have done).
Infosthetics
This March 23 PingMag article, Infosthetics: The Beauty of Data Visualization, is an interview with Andrew Vande Moore, an assistant professor at The Key Centre of Design Computing & Cognition at the University of Sydney who specializes in Information Design, or Infosthetics, as he calls it.
In Vande Moore's words, "Information design is about the design of information graphics, and the design of visual displays of information," which doesn't really give you an idea of just how wonderfully this branch of design straddles art and science, evoking not only meaning, but also beauty and sometimes emotion from data, via graphical representation (Edward Tufte called it "the poetry of visual information").
The article has some fantastic examples of the field and a number of links. One of these is a graphical representation of Iraq war casualties which gives insight into the demographics of deceased U.S. service members from the beginning of the Iraq war to the present. I think it's an incredible example of the power of Infosthetics.
