Blog Action Day
The sexy design of this site makes me want to give those DC Greenpeace activist that accost me everyday for my phone number a few more minutes of my valuable lunchbreak time. Oh wait… now now, that design made me a little delirious. <clears head> I don’t have to sell my soul to the information-collectors, I can blog to help make a difference… and so should you.

Hostess Blog
Reminds me that being domestic can be cool. If I am going to have my bitches over for brunch, I want them to have a divine experience over my bad-ass tea and crumpets.

Whimsey Press
Half the fun in buying someone a gift is designing the gift wrap. What, you don’t design and screenprint your own giftwrap? Well of course you don’t because you probably have 10 deadlines to meet and a proposal to get out. You can still present a token of affection to a loved one with the same passion as you would pitch a client with this delightful wrapping paper.

MizPee
I can’t even tell you how many times I have been enjoying the city and have the entire experience interrupted with having to hit the potty. If you can’t find a Starbucks or Chipotle hopefully this little application will come in handy. I have never used it but I think its a clever little idea.

Saint Bob
If I had a big conspicuous office where I was suppose to look official and important I would hang one of these behind my desk. Who doesn’t love the Patron Saint of Happy Accidents? Please don’t steal this guy’s shit… he should get all the credit for the canonization of Bob Ross.

Pastafarian
“According to the Pastafarian belief system, pirates are “absolute divine beings” and the original Pastafarians. Their image as “thieves and outcasts” is misinformation spread by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages and Hare Krishnas. Pastafarianism says that they were in fact “peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will” who distributed candy to small children. Pastafarians celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September.” -Wikipedia
Arrrr!

Hip Young Thing
Short and sweet posts on things that kick ass. I Dig this little blog.

On Thursday evening I had the pleasure of attending an exhibition in honor of the memory of Tom Suzuki. Walking through the gallery I scanned over the humble pieces of everyday printed collateral push-pinned to the white walls that Suzuki created. There were no screaming examples of bold innovation, just beautiful design that was implemented in every-day context. I marvel at finding good design in spectacularly ordinary places, and Tom Suzuki will be remembered for implementing it in the most academic of those situations… text books.

An Excerpt by Steven Heller From the New York Times:

When Mr. Suzuki was starting out as a designer, American textbook publishers had been adhering to formulaic designs for decades, with printing often done in black and white to save money and professor-authors required to furnish their own often-prosaic photographs and sketched diagrams. Mr. Suzuki “turned the process on its head,” said a former colleague, Eugene Schwartz, currently an editor at large of ForeWord Magazine, devoted to independent publishing.

In the late-1960’s, as art director of the textbook division of CRM, publishers of Psychology Today magazine, Mr. Suzuki developed original design concepts and fluid production methods and created mold-breaking typography and visuals.

To make textbook design more efficient, he introduced a storyboard approach adapted from magazine-production techniques. With each book’s content precisely plotted, it was possible to commission photography and illustrations while the authors were still writing. He developed novel ideas for images, like designing three-dimensional models and having professional stylists stage editorial photography.

“He had that important editorial designer gift — he actually read what he was designing for,” Mr. Schwartz said. “And the art department worked interactively with the editorial department and the authors and consultants in developing art and photo concepts.”

The so-called coffee table textbook eventually became standard.

Often Designers can become so focused on that one perfect client or scenario that will create the conditions right to produce that one ultimate portfolio piece. Suzuki had a clean understated style that contributed to overall experience of everything he created.

The Creative Spirit of Tom Suzuki is going on through October 24, 2007 at Northern Virginia Community College. It is worth checking out.

I have a bit of a fetish for awesome information design and it gets nearly compulsive when it becomes a reacting entity on the world wide web. The idea that massive amounts of information, many times being ever-changing and dynamic can be molded into a visual form, manipulated, and sifted through is all sorts of awesome to me. I will admit, I am the type of person who flips through a Magazine (backwards) to look at all the pictures first before deciding what I want to read in it. Maybe its my ADD that makes bare-bones text not interesting enough to hold my attention, or perhaps its just my love of pretty pictures, but I foresee a future where information on the web is presented in more interesting interactive methods more often. With the user interacting and producing data through social media, creative interactive visualizations of the data produced brings a whole new fresh engagement to the experience.

Obviously this concept is not that revolutionary, there are many places on the web that showcase stellar interactive information design. Technology such as flash and Java have made it possible to illustrate and animate static concepts. Popular examples of these are interactive timelines, maps, and experiences.
Examples:

Explore Monticello

British History Timeline

Battle of Gettysburg

Now lets take this concept a step further. Rather than illustrating stagnant information lets visualize dynamic content. Instead of actual events or places the user can now see broader concepts such as emotions or relationships. A major attraction to social media is discovery, the process of finding that 6 degrees of separation between them and someone they met at a conference or party. Interactive information design illustrating that connection introduces the user to tangible representation of what that relationship is.
Check out some examples!

We Feel Fine

We feel fine was built by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar as an experiment. The system…

searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). …

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion.

Digg Arc

Arc was developed as a collaboration between Digg and Stamen Design (who are Bad-ASS) to display stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs.

Twitter Blocks

According to this site Twitter blocks was designed

to allow users to navigate Twitter neighborhoods (or “blocks”) in an abstract way. A public timeline is represented by an orange sequence of blocks, which offsprings a set of block series that depict the statuses of users & the people they follow. The visualization is designed to allow existing twitter users to discover other existing twitter users.

While many of these applications serve as entertaining ways to wade through tons of information there is rarely a deeper motivation or end goal than to just find more interesting information. I am hoping to see this type of interactive information design utilized to not only enhance the enjoyment of surfing through social media but elevate the effectiveness of the experience.

A great example of a site that is using visualization to enhance their search function is

etsy.com

Not only does this method help shoppers but it helps buyers to connect with others in the network who are interested in their products. Etsy is a marketplace for “all things handmade” where you can find a seller who creates products with a specific style, and then see their connections to locate other products. These visual functions help the user manage a concept that is vague to verbalize and subjective… “style”. You can also search through a geo-locator and sort by color. These search methods contribute to the experience of shopping, making Etsy as much a social network as a marketplace. In some circumstances I even feel addicted to using these visualizers, like a video game… gradually becoming more effective at navigating through the merchandise to be rewarded with the perfect product.

Social media can be visually interesting and innovative. If designed with the user’s end-goal in mind creative ways of surfacing content can enhance the overall experience of the web.

[tags]interactive information design, twitter blocks, digg labs, digg arc, etsy, wefeelfine.org, interactive social media, user experience , Web 2.0 Design, Web 2.0, visual thesaurus, Stamen Design[/tags]