Firestarters: The @scriberian visualization

Nice visualization by the folks at Scriberia of the Firestarters evening a couple of weeks ago. Also see this post by Contagious Magazine and this one by James Caig.

Wordlings

This is a really interesting project by Pete Warden, who, inspired by two projects I often turn to myself – Wordle and OpenHeatMap – has created a project of his own that creates word clouds and fits them into irregular shapes, such as country borders, or brand logos. I like that it creates a relationship between words and images. It’s not something I often think about, but it’s an interesting creative exercise. What would ‘turquoise’ look like shaped? or ‘phantasmagoria’?

I did a bit of an experiment keying in the text from the ‘About’ pages of 3 design-related companies: Made by Many, Ideo and Idiom Design (in that order). The first two are fairly similar, the third rather sparse – it looks like it uses frames, which have their own usability and search issues. If I’m wrong, feel free to correct me, I’d love to learn more.

A spending diary

I found this on Ffffound. The source is apparently Diametunim, but all I can see there is the word ‘reboot’, which takes me nowhere particularly interesting. (Dear owner-of-Diametunim, you may want to change that).

Anyway, I thought the visualization of spending plotted against the geography of New York was quite interesting. Imagine if you had that for your expenses. Would you avoid certain areas of a city because you knew you were prone to spend more in those areas? Or would it mean that you tend to have more fun in those areas, and so would you hang around those areas more?