This stunning little map-site of Reykjavik city centre is THE prettiest thing. Hand-drawn and interactive, it does the mundane work of any number of BIA/tourism/retail/neighbourhood/destination websites, with 10,0000x the style. Love the closeup drawings/photos of each point of interest.
Produced by design group Borgamynd; funding in part through grants by the City of Reykjavik.
An adjustable stencil for taking your statistics-based infographic to the streets (with temporary spray chalk, of course).
Neat idea, though the adjustability means it’s not a very clean-looking image.
(via GOOD)
Cool! Mapnificent is a great little location-analysis tool that lets you map how far you can get on public transit from a single location, in any direction, based on the amount of time you’ve got.
It’s a different take on the kind of work that the WalkScore folks have been doing, sussing out how connected you are, based on your transit mode of choice.
Clean and basic Google-map base, very user-friendly interface, with handy sliders that let you see quickly see the differences between a 15-minute trip and an hour-long one.
(via Jesse T.)
A few of the really lovely and cheeky illustrations from Paris vs New York: a tally of two cities.
(via )
Smitherman vs Ford, by ward. (via Torontoist and Lex)
Also some more detailed by-ward interactive maps by Patrick Cain, for The Toronto Star.
BlogTO maps the municipal election results since 1997.
Just thinking through this…
Good Mag writes about The Living Principles for Design, a project that puts forward a series of questions for organizations to ponder in their approach, which fall along the usual four dimensions: environmental, social (they call it “people,” which is maybe a better word for that dimension), cultural and economic.
Then someone mapped a few sustainability-and/or-design-oriented organizations based on how they focus their efforts — the coloured rings represent each of the four dimensions, and the surface area presumably estimates what proportion each dimension takes up of the organizations’ work/effort. Green (for environment) appears in nearly every organization plotted, mainly because sustainability is primarily linked with green issues.
The map then plots these organizations on a graph, which begins to act as a first step in explaining the philosophical differences between organizations. Y-axis ranges from selective to integrated, which helps to visually separate single dimension organizations (lots of purely green dots) from multiple issue ones. X-axis ranges from visionary (where the few pure orange dots lie, and many of the dots that include orange) to actionable (lots of pure green)
The “people” dimension are the orange rings — that’s the most interesting one to me. It’s notoriously difficult to quantify social/people issues - the focus is too broad, the results too subjective or subtle or long-term.
via Kurt White
Stop drinking bottled water!
Colour. Oh colour, how you elude my grasp. Too many formative design years in non-profits with zero communications budget? A 21st century kind of colour-palette blindness? Whatever it is, either the data doesn’t read well with the palettes I put together, or it pulls the whole graphic into a weird early-90s high-schoolish aesthetic.
Enter ColorZilla and Kuler. ColorZilla is a great little Firefox extension that saved my butt with any web project I’ve ever done. It’s a great little tool that lets you sample a colour you like on your screen, and have it spit back the exact RGB/HEX colour values you’ll need to reproduce it on YOUR project.
Kuler is a little Adobe gem —a website which enables users to create and upload pretty colour palettes, and then to name and tag them for easy searchability. You can vote on the ones you like best, and use them as inspiration for your own projects. As far as I can tell, there are no colour values attached to the palettes, so reproducing the palettes requires some good ol’ fashioned eyeballing.
I just realized this week that I no longer have to be fettered to Internet Explorer at work, but installing Firefox is still an issue. Chrome was easy peasy, though — so here’s the one-two punch for Chrome: EyeDropper provides a very nice replacement for ColorZilla(though because it displays as a pop-up window, user interaction is not as tidy).
EyeDropper doesn’t work on flash-based sites like Kuler, which led me to ColourLovers — a similar site for palette sharing. Not as slick a design as Kuler, maybe, but I find it more usable — and more popular.
Forgot about ColorBrewer…comes up with colour palettes especially for maps and graphics. Choose from similar-spectrum palettes (to show gradations of change) and divergent palettes (to show discrete categories). PERFECT.
![nevver:
The Perfect Pour [detail]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5kedgIagV1qz6f9yo1_500.png)
The Perfect Pour [detail]
Urban planner with a penchant for social policy, public engagement, infographics, illustration, and zee artz. This is a small collection of notes-to-self.
