Posts tagged graphics

Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.

In a recent TED talk, Chip Kidd walks us through the design process he used to produce iconic book covers over the last 20 years, from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park to David Sedaris’ Naked.

His thoughts about digital books and tablets: “Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.”

Bonus, Part 01: Has Kindle Killed the Book Cover? via The Atlantic.

Bonus, Part 02: Is the Book Cover Dead, via Technology Review

Of Total Income Increase in 2010… Steven Rattner, a Wall Street executive and New York Times Op-Ed contributor, writes: In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households. Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent. The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income. Steven Rattner, The New York Times. The Rich Get Even Richer.

Of Total Income Increase in 2010…

Steven Rattner, a Wall Street executive and New York Times Op-Ed contributor, writes:

In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.

Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.

The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.

Steven Rattner, The New York Times. The Rich Get Even Richer.

Country Codes of the World Via ByteLevel.

Country Codes of the World

Via ByteLevel.

Designing the News

While at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Johnny Selman monitored the BBC and created a poster out of each day’s “most important” news. The result is BBCx360.

Via Imprint:

“The purpose of this project is to promote the awareness of global current events with the American public,” Selman wrote in the introduction to his website. “‘American citizens know little about current events in general and even less about overseas events’ according to The Washington Post in 2006.”

Shown here:

  • May 7, 2011 - Libya ‘scatters mines’ in Misrata
  • August 29, 2011 - Colombia’s long task to identify conflict victims
  • August 16, 2011 - Tibetan monk burns himself to death in China
  • April 23, 2011 - Syria protests: Security forces shoot at mourners
  • April 19, 2011 - India: Haryana widows battered to death

Visit BBCx360 to view this exceptional project.

Men’s Journal: Now Extra Manly Wenner Media’s Men’s Journal hits the stands with a new logo. Via Armin Vit: The new logo abandons the outlines, shadows, and dimensionality in favor of a bad-ass, bold, and condensed treatment. The combination of hard angles in the “S” and “R” coupled with the barely round corners gives the logo an extra masculine whiff that the previous logos lacked. The tracking and kerning is quite impeccable too and it looks great emblazoned across the width of the magazine’s cover. Image: Old logo on left, new on the right. Via Under Consideration.

Men’s Journal: Now Extra Manly

Wenner Media’s Men’s Journal hits the stands with a new logo.

Via Armin Vit:

The new logo abandons the outlines, shadows, and dimensionality in favor of a bad-ass, bold, and condensed treatment. The combination of hard angles in the “S” and “R” coupled with the barely round corners gives the logo an extra masculine whiff that the previous logos lacked. The tracking and kerning is quite impeccable too and it looks great emblazoned across the width of the magazine’s cover.

Image: Old logo on left, new on the right. Via Under Consideration.

Happy Valentines Day

Here are a few of our favorite Google Valentine Doodles over the years.

Images: Google Doodles (and commentary) via Network World.

All the Tools You Need to Sketch an Interface The “Art” of Sketching Interfaces by Naughty Little Scamps for a presentation at Interactions12 in Dublin. 

All the Tools You Need to Sketch an Interface

The “Art” of Sketching Interfaces by Naughty Little Scamps for a presentation at Interactions12 in Dublin. 

NFL Economics with Bill Maher

In a “New Rules” segment, Bill Maher argues that the NFL is so successful because its share the wealth economics mirror the “socialist” policies of US Democrats while the MLB is less successful because of its Republican oriented capitalism.

Independently, London-based animator Fraser Davidson took the audio and interpreted it with some Soviet-era style graphics.

The Atlantic explores the socialist NFL versus the capitalist Major Leagues here.

Slate’s take on it is here.

The Big Book of Fonts, 1912 Edition Via Kottke.org: The Internet Archive is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It’s a 1300-page book listing hundreds of typefaces and their possible use cases.

The Big Book of Fonts, 1912 Edition

Via Kottke.org:

The Internet Archive is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It’s a 1300-page book listing hundreds of typefaces and their possible use cases.

Fox’s Graphics Department Continues with its Very Bad Week

Fox’s Graphics Department Continues with its Very Bad Week

Fox’s Graphics Department is Having a Very Bad Week

And it’s only Wednesday.

The unemployment graph where 8.6 is magically greater than 8.8 or 8.9 floated through the Tumblr on Monday (the horizontal lines have been added to the original Fox graphic).

Now it’s on to geography. Let’s admire how New Hampshire replaces Vermont and Utah is now Nevada.

Images via Media Matters.

Weapons of Mass Creation A bit of afternoon awesome by Justin Kamerer via Angryblue. H/T: Colossal.

Weapons of Mass Creation

A bit of afternoon awesome by Justin Kamerer via Angryblue.

H/T: Colossal.

The days of Excel spreadsheets and HTML tables are gone. Whether we’re watching on TV, reading online, or in a newspaper we expect beautiful and easy to understand representations of important information, no matter how large the underlying data is. DocumentCloud, Information is Beautiful, Piwik, Mining of Massive Datasets, PACER, Google Refine, Google Fusion Tables, Google Public Data Explorer, IBM’s Many Eyes, and ScraperWiki are just some of the data driven journalism tools widely used by mainstream media today.

“New Tools for Today’s Investigative Journalist,”  Dan Meredith

(via lifeandcode)

lifeandcode

Comic Books, Grids and Designing the News

The Color Machine produced this interview with Khoi Vinh, former design director for the New York Times. In it, Vinh talks about design grids, reducing complexity and how comic books helped him formulate a design theory of his own.

Unrelated but Interesting: Vinh and Scott Ostler just launched Mixel. It’s a social iPad collage making tool for the iPad.

Via Vinh’s blog Subtraction:

Our goal with Mixel is to turn the act of art-making into something incredibly easy, fun and even addictive. Just as importantly, we also want art-making to be deeply social. Mixel is a social network of its own — you sign in with Facebook, and you can find and follow anyone on the network to see all the great work they’re producing. You can also comment, like and share the art, just as you would on any other social network.

But we chose collage for a very important reason: it makes art easy. Photos, the component pieces of every collage, are among the most social and viral content on the Web, and allowing people to combine them into new, highly specific expressions of who they are and what they’re interested in is powerful. Collage also has a wonderfully accessible quality; few people are comfortable with a brush or a drawing implement, but almost everyone is comfortable cutting up images and recombining them in new, expressive, surprising or hilarious ways. We all used to do this as kids.

Mixel is available in the iTunes store. A video of it in action is at mixel.cc.