Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective “strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.
… As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at a street façade a street slide…
The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation’s electrical systems.
USA Today and Moody’s Economy.com work together on this compelling graphic that shows the forecasted jobs growth in the U.S. Here is a bit about this project from the USA Today’s site:
This graphic shows actual job growth through first-quarter 2010 and Moody’s Economy.com’s forecasted job growth for second-quarter 2010 through first-quarter 2014. It covers every state, the District of Columbia and 384 metro areas, broken down by fourteen industry sectors. The data are seasonally adjusted.
The powerful map application by Stamen design and CNN let you keep track of US and coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. The application is a set of two maps that display the same data but are organized in different ways. The map on the right side shows the locations of the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan while the map on the left shows where each soldier originally comes from. I think a subtle but very well designed feature of the application is the synchronization between the maps. You can mouse over one map to see the corresponding data point highlighted on the other one. Check the map out to see what I am talking about.
Head over to CNN’s Behind the Scenes blog to read more about the people involved. Many kudos to everyone working on this project.
By Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections at the British Library:
From the USSR’s Be On Guard! map in 1921 to Google Earth, a new exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever.
If I get to choose a favorite from this collection, it would be the London subway map above. For me the map is one of those very few that are still shaping our current trend in design aesthetics.
Dismissed as too ‘revolutionary’ when it was first submitted in 1931, Harry Beck’s Underground map solved the problem of how to represent clearly and elegantly a dense, complex interweaving of train lines.
Placing the stations at similar intervals regardless of their true locations amplifies the area of central London, increasing its clarity, while the straight lines and interchange symbols confer a simplicity and order on the network. A cartographic icon.
The first graphic puts things in perspective by showing us a sense of scale. At its current rate, the leak pumps out enough oil to fill a third of an olympic-size swimming pool every day. The second graphic is a timeline map showing the spread in the Gulf as of May 20th.
I didn’t work on these since I was busy working on other projects, but I think Clay Frost, our infographics designers, did a great job creating these and keeping them up to date.
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