Notable people in the field data visualization

3 Comments

• Zachary Forest Johnson

  Posted Dec 31, 2008 at 6:37 pm
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  Anybody from Stamen Design? And Martin Wattenberg and Ben Schneidermann belong on any such list. Though they get less atten­tion for it than the Times and Post, the LA Times (http://projects.latimes.com/index/) has pro­duced a num­ber of inter­est­ing data graph­ics. I’m excited by how large and diverse this field has become.

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• Tom Carden

  Posted Jan 2, 2009 at 7:29 pm
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  It cer­tainly seems like online and inter­ac­tive infographics/visualization is a rel­a­tively small field, but I think print info­graph­ics as a dis­ci­pline is a lit­tle big­ger? Many pro­fes­sional graphic design­ers are com­pe­tent at data pre­sen­ta­tion and if you count sci­en­tific visu­al­iza­tion and cartography/GIS I think that this kind of list would quickly get out of hand.

  That said, lim­it­ing it to prac­ti­tion­ers with an online pres­ence as you have keeps it man­age­able. I com­piled such a list for myself before, but sadly I don’t recall where. So the fol­low­ing are all off the top of my head. Apologies for omissions.

  Martin Wattenberg should def­i­nitely be on such a list, as should his col­leagues from IBM/ManyEyes Fernanda Viegas and Jesse Kriss.

  As well as Gabriel Dance and Matthew Ericson of the NYTimes, I see cred­its for Amanda Cox, Matthew Bloch and Shan Carter on a lot of the best visu­al­iza­tions they do. Lee Byron is also gain­ing and attrac­tive port­fo­lio of works, includ­ing some for the NYTimes.

  Marcos Weskamp (Marumushi) and Remon Tijssen (Fluid.nl) are both now work­ing on visu­al­iza­tions for Adobe.

  Max Gadney used to lead the BBC News Online design team and has an inter­est­ing blog of info­graph­ics, albeit not interactive.

  Golan Levin does more art than visu­al­iza­tion now, but check out his stuff from a few years ago.

  Laura Kurgan and com­pany at Colombia’s Spatial Information Design Lab do very inter­est­ing stuff (Million Dollar Blocks is the stand­out piece).

  Carlo Ratti’s Senseable City lab at MIT is crank­ing out visu­al­iza­tion quite regularly.

  Bestiario should be here as a group, I think Santiago Ortiz is involved with them.

  Likewise the folks behind CatalogTree should be on this list.

  Aaron Koblin and Michael Chang were two stand­out mem­bers of Yahoo’s defunct Design Research group, headed by Joy Mountford. Aaron Koblin is now at Google but is most famous for Flight Patterns, which I think span out of Celestial Mechanics with Gabriel Dunne and Scott Hessels. He also did the 3D Radiohead visualization/music video, which had an online com­po­nent that another Aaron (Meyers) worked on. Aaron Meyers also worked on Digg Labs at Stamen.

  Jeff Veen headed up Adaptive Path’s Measure Map, sub­se­quently acquired by Google.

  Judith Donath is another name that springs to mind from MIT (Sociable Media group had a lot of inter­est­ing work?)

  Jeffrey Heer made the Java library Prefuse and sub­se­quently ported it to Flash as Flare.

  I don’t think Nicolas Felton does inter­ac­tive stuff, but his per­sonal annual reports are extremely good and influential.

  Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar should be here for We Feel Fine.

  W. Bradford Paley has been work­ing in this area for a long time.

  Moritz Stefaner has a great a blog about his stud­ies last year.

  Lisa Strausfeld and Christian Marc Schmidt at Pentagram do inter­est­ing work. I think David Lu worked with them too, and his port­fo­lio is good.

  I should stop now before this list gets com­pre­hen­sive enough that my ommis­sions are glar­ing – these are all off the top of my head but if I think of more I’ll be sure to let you know.

  Of course, if I was mak­ing such a list again all my fel­low design­ers at Stamen would be on it … Eric Rodenbeck, Mike Migurski, Shawn Allen, Geraldine Sarmiento and Sha Hwang.

  PS I’ve left out URLs for every­one because most can eas­ily be Googled for, and because it’s your blog Do let me know if any­one is hard to find though.

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• Moritz Stefaner

  Posted Jan 10, 2009 at 6:18 am
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  Nice list and thanks for the men­tion! Appreciated! (Another good rea­son to get a proper port­fo­lio online

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