This is hectic! Jay Z worked with Droga5 and Bing to create this massive viral and ambient campaign for his new book "decoded", the lengths and detail they've gone to with this is pretty impressive, printing pages of the book in relevant settings (for the subject on said pages) from the bottom of a pool to the inside of a custom gucci jacket. you need to see all the examples to understand how big this project is. http://trendland.net/2010/11/24/jay-z-decoded-32-pages-revealed/#more-54034

some really cool type treatment by this guy http://www.thereis.co.uk/typography-one/cream/

http://www.tomfoulsham.co.uk/wiggletable/images/

very strange and interesting device!

Blog Rationale

When I received the brief to start a blog, I wasn't sure what to make of it. Although I understand the usefulness of having a space to record and link to online sources of inspiration and areas of interest, I wasn't really sure how to go about writing entries, as it was not going to be a personal record, but read by other students and lecturers. The difference between a critiquing blog of current design work, to be read by other designers (and anyone else), and a personal 'online sketchbook' of influences and interests, seems vast, and I wasn't sure which way to treat it. Not being able to treat it as personal, and so brief and pretty unexplanatory to anyone but me, led me to start writing long boring entries trying to explain and rationalise my posts, and I think this made my blog suffer, as I didn't enjoy it or feel that I was gaining much from it, and so didn't post regularly. But by now I think I've started to get into the habit of posting links to interesting ideas or design as soon as I see them, and am finding a balance between a personal record and a public display.

I wanted to see what fields of design my blog entries focused most on, and thought that over time this would become obvious, but also I probably consciously chose similar styles or areas in design, as I was scanning the internet for potential dissertation inspiration as well as my independent project. This process made me realise just how much writing and coverage design and the design community receives online, mostly by other designers, and how many useful resources there are, whether directly design related or not.

At the time of starting my blog I was becoming a little disenchanted with the graphic design and advertising industry/process as a whole, partly due to my experience of work placements, where I would be artworking or retouching, with no real creative input. Also, however, because I began to notice more and more design that seemed to me just 'pretty pictures', over designed and decorated, sometimes to follow trends, often nice work, but never very useful, or with any real meaning. I remember reading about 'designers being able to change the world' years ago, and, recognising that communicating things effectively was crucial to understanding them, really believing that design could help civilisations learn, grow, and progress. It was interesting that we received the 'shout about an issue' brief at the start of term, perhaps it was a way of our lecturers trying to show us that we as designers can still have a positive influence on the world if we do it right.

As a response to these feelings, I started to look at areas of design that I took to have more 'use', or practical application, after reading an article about 'the new wave of maps'. Data mapping, infographics, Infovis, all seemed like interesting and 'worthy' fields to work in, combining science and discovery with design and imaging, and I made an effort to learn more about these areas of design. Even these disciplines showed signs of over embellishment and aesthetic over emphasis, with lots of work being created to hang on a gallery wall, as data visualization continued to become a 'cool' subject in the design world. Even though these areas are widely covered by many different blogs and websites, and have become one of the hot areas of design today, the integrity and basic principles that attracted me are still clearly evident in most work from this field.

Having to differentiate between effective design and design I 'like' has been very useful for me, in highlighting the difference between aesthetically pleasing work,and work that actually communicates something of value effectively, and how this is achieved. I have become a lot more conscious of how often I add or use graphic elements that have no real purpose, and hope that my work will become a lot less decorative as a result. However, it is hard to keep any stylistic features completely from your work, and also to find a balance between boring or plain visuals and and the overly designed, especially when you have just started to notice and appreciate how important this balance is. I have certainly begun to appreciate a lot more the value of effective use of composition, negative space, line weight, and many other graphic elements that I had previously not given nearly enough thought.

Looking at this area of design has also opened my eyes to the highly social, almost anthropological aspect of some work in the field. With a massive increase in data availability in recent years, due in part to new laws about freedom of information, and also large scale data mining operations, governments, military organizations, political parties, and social networks have all been scrutinised, and looted, for their vast banks of data. This has led to many interesting analyses and depictions of previously unseen information, often documenting key events in modern history, or providing an overview of phenomena or recent developments. Being able to see this type of information visualized has helped many people understand what was previously unseen, unnoticed, or covered up. As most of this data is made publicly available, it also makes it easy for anyone to use it for any project they see fit, often throwing up surprising and interesting results.

Although perhaps not directly influencing my aims for my personal project, my blog has definitely broadened my horizons, and brought my attention to some of the most cutting edge applications of design today. I hope my work as a result will become more considered, relevant, and generally better at getting the message across.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/wikipedia-lamest-edit-wars/

This is hilarious. People have far to much time on their hands. Quite admire the dogged perseverance to stand up for what you believe is right though, even if it is ridiculously trivial and sad! another example of using publicly available data/information to create entertaining images.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/peak-break-up-times-on-facebook/

A funny and very interesting bit of infographics here, that uses data from facebook to map frequency of relationship break ups across the year. Some interesting patterns are clearly visible, and some interesting observations about them! on a more serious note, the accessibility of this type of data is really driving this new wave of infographics, and I think its one of the most interesting areas of communication design right now. Such images have the potential to give brilliant insight into cultural and social phenomena and trends, and this access to data is opening up all sorts of opportunities to observe such trends in more detail.

http://popchartlab.com/index.php/poster_detail/grand_taxonomy_of_rap_names/



A great little poster from Pop Chart Lab, looking at the different taxonomies of rappers and MC names, a very interesting subject for me. Entertaining and enlightening, it shows the main areas and subjects that seem to have inspired rappers' choice of names, and groups them accordingly, reading like a who's who of rap and hip hop music. Although it is difficult to follow some of the links, due to combinations of words in names that that fall into taxonomies placed at either ends of the page, the majority of them are well organised and easily comparable to their fellow rappers, and major trends and links are clearly visible. It would be interesting to see if popularity of certain taxonomies were influenced by any other factors, such as genre (gangsta rap, hip hop, crunk etc.) or location, there's definitely scope to continue this theme!

An interesting standalone piece, showing just how big Africa really is! A lot of other interesting stuff at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/ . They've written some good books to.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/19/women-egypt-sexual-harassment-harassmap

Another interesting new application for "open source mapping technology", which could make a very real and important contribution to womens safety in Egypt. As well as providing instant advice and support to victims of sexual harassment, it builds up a "publicly available map of harassment hotspots", in order to highlight areas of potential danger. However, whether the much-maligned Egyptian authorities will use this information to increase effective policing of such areas, and improve the levels of safety and security for women where it is obviously necessary, is not yet clear. The fact that an independent group of volunteers have noticed such a serious issue that they have developed quite such an application for this technology, really highlights the need for it, and the apparent lack of policing of this kind of problem. Whether the graphic output of this application, which will be viewable online here http://harassmap.org/ will be used to it's full effect is yet to be seen, but it could certainly be a very powerful and important tool in bringing a stop to this threat of harassment and abuse of women in Egypt.

After working with a group of (mainly) autistic children for the last couple of weeks, it's really hit home to me just how important and useful graphic design can be to people . Some of the kids use a communication system called PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) which basically involves showing pictures of items/things they want to communicate to a teacher or carer, in order to assist their verbal communication, or in place of it. Visual communication in the purest sense of the word, this process makes day to day life so much easier for these kids, and it also makes you think about how simple graphic design can often need to be.

Just read a very interesting bit on the age old 'form follows function' debate. instead of concentrating on the 'follows' aspect, the author (Jan Michl) has concentrated on the 'function' aspect of the dictum, and whether anything can really function without an already existing form. He raises some interesting points, particularly when looking at how in nature a form exists before any function is an issue:

"According to this theory, small incidental variations in the physical and behavioral makeup of offspring of the same litter produce variations in their ability to adapt to a particular habitat. The individuals that happen to be better adapted to the particular environment have more chance, through no effort of their own, to survive to adulthood and have offspring, which inherit the advantageous variations; these offspring in turn are exposed to the further pressure of natural selection. The specific habitat functions as the selecting factor, while inheritance accumulates the selected, i.e. advantageous, variations. In this way, in the course of generations, design-like adaptations slowly develop."

However, I still feel that the 'form follows function' expresses well an idea that all designers should work by, i.e. to design with the purpose of the object/ building/ image/ text in mind, and to include only aesthetic/structural features that will generally aid the usefulness of the finished article. It's an interesting read anyway!

here's the link - http://janmichl.com/eng.fff-hai.html

"These images are generated by evaluating and interpreting the 1997 music video “Mo Money Mo Problems” from the first disc of the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death. The algorithm detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion from frame to frame, using the initial frame as their starting point. The output is rendered as a vector image, the curves represent the motion. The points represent the pixels detected in the edge, their size determined by the distance from their previous location, the further, the larger the circle. The color and location of the points are determined by the corresponding pixel in that frame. The bright colored track suits worn by Puff Daddy and Mase in the dark backgrounds make for good tracking and nice color combinations."

http://nickhardeman.com/blog/?p=244

An example of an entirely aesthetic use of data visualization. This is the sort of thing that seems to get far more attention than other much more useful applications of mapping data, pretty much just because it looks cool. It has no real relevance to the origins of the data (the biggie video), and you can't get any information back from it. The complete other side of beauty vs. functionality - looks good but has absolutely no functional use.

GPS mapping in Lisbon

This caught my eye recently, as I've been looking into how design can help us understand otherwise abstract or complex concepts or data.
Put simply, GPS was used to track 1534 cars travelling around Lisbon, Portugal, during October '09, and the GPS coordinates and velocity of the vehicles gathered over the month is condensed into one single virtual day, grouping the data by second and displaying it as an animation. you can see one of the stills, and a link to one of the animations.
With positive applications for traffic control, policing, town planning etc., this kind of mapping is obviously helpful, but I think there are far greater and more varied applications for this kind of link up of technology and design, and I intend to find them.

Traffic in Lisbon – emphasis on sluggish areas from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.