The time series show U.S. revenue, spending and debt since the 1940s. You can also compare national public debt as a percentage of the GDP for different countries in the world.
I am impressed with what USA Today has been doing lately. Nice job, guys!
A few words from Ashley Wells, our Creative Director:
So we’ve stacked up the pieces with the most compelling content on top. Start with a video. Scroll down to read. Want more? Show more. Long text simply expands in place. Then scroll down for photos. Lots of large photos. Share your favorite. Via e-mail. On Facebook. On Twitter. Continue down the page. See what others are saying. Expand. Respond.
Keep going. We post thousands of updates a day and are constantly searching them for related angles. It’s all right there near the bottom of every story. Want the bigger picture? There’s a dashboard view of the latest news trends below. Or jump back to the top of the page. Our site navigation gets bigger, too. Just when you need it.
Read the rest of the article here
Jamis mentions this over at 37signals and I totally agree with him. The keyboard shortcut icons don’t make any sense. I rather have the Microsoft’s way of annotating shortcuts with all the keys spelled out, e.g. Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Alt-Del (my personal favorite combination 
). Or even better, Apple could just print the icons on the keys themselves.
Click on image to view the visualization
The Guardian built this slick twitter visualization for the World Cup 2010 that lets you replay the twitter trends during a game in real time. Alastair Dant, one of the people involved in the project, wrote this interesting postmortem about how they made that happen.
So I was playing around with my server settings the other day and came across this when I tried to update my current address. I guess most people won’t even notice, but the * used next to an input field usually signifies that the field is required. I think it is a pretty widely used standard. Too bad, my host hasn’t heard about it :/
Click on image to view the chart
From BBC comes this pretty neat interactive treemap of the Top 500 Supercomputers list as of June 2010. The list is sortable and surfaces a few interesting patterns such as the domination of linux operating system to China’s 2nd place. I will let you explore the rest by playing with it yourself. Have fun!
Via BBC
A List Apart
AIGA
Alberto Cairo
Andre Michelle
AS3 Design Patterns blog
Data Mining blog
Flowing Data
Information Aesthetics
Innovative Interactivity
Interactive Narratives
Mark Boulton
News Designer
Stamen design
Subtraction by Khoi Vinh
Typographica
Visual Complexity
Yanko Design