• Urban Open Data: 100 Million 311 Calls in New York Visualized [Information Aesthetics]
  New York Magazine: Data Done Right [Creative Review]
  Harmony [Mr. Doob]
  • “Javascript drawing tool”

• Lightning In A Bottle [FT]
  • “That diversity shows in the kinds of technology companies New York has produced. They are not just tech-for-tech’s-sake projects. Instead, they use software to enhance other passions: parenting, crafts, gossip, gameplay, health, and so on. They use technology in clever ways, but they are fundamentally about something else. I think that quality derives from their metropolitan roots, from the scenius of a big city. It is no accident that the slogan of Meetup, the éminence grise of New York start-ups, which allows groups of people with shared interests to organise face-to-face meetings, is “using the Internet to get off the Internet”. You can’t stay at home, staring at a screen all night, when there’s so much happening on your doorstep.”
  Inside the Google Books Algorithm [The Atlantic]
  • “But what about when the company has to reach outside the web? The printed volumes represented on Google Books form a completely different kind of problem. Google’s famous algorithm can’t be deployed to search through books because they don’t link to each other in the way that webpages do. There is no perfect BookRank corollary for PageRank.”
  Impure: A New Visualization Programming Language for Non-Programmers [Information Aesthetics]
  • “Impure is a new visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. Developed by Bestiario, a Spanish information design start-up, Impure aims to bridge the link between ‘non-programmers’ and data visualization by linking information to programmatic operators, controls and visualization methods through a new visual and modular interface.”
  The Creative Phase [AVC]
  • “When we look at our portfolio and analyze what has worked and what has not, we see a high correlation between having that “creative element” firmly ensconced into the founding team and success. The teams that are engineer heavy and creative light have not worked nearly as well as the teams that are creative heavy and engineer light.”
  Seven-Inch Record Sleeves [Flickr]
  • “A gallery of – mostly – record company sleeves (as opposed to picture covers), but with a few from record shops and the occasional homemade or hand-decorated one too. No reproductions, all originals. Not in any particular order”

• Rustoleum’s New Cap and the Demise of American Spray Paint [Imprint]
  Design Ethos: A Bugle of Change [Design Observer]
  • "For too long now the ethos of graphic design — the fundamental sentiment that guides the practice of design and the activities of designers — has been understood as a link between suppliers and consumers….If we do nothing more than change a few words in the key phase — from link between supplier and consumer to bridge between information and purpose — we suggest a much broader arena of activity and imply substantially increased value."
  How to be a Data Journalist [Guardian]
  • "Data journalism trainer and writer Paul Bradshaw explains how to get started in data journalism, from getting to the data to visualising it"
  Visualizing.org
  • "Making sense of complex issues through data and design."

• Journalism in the Age of Data [Stanford]
  • “Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?”
  Ten Things I Have Learned [Milton Glaser]
• Clive Thompson on the Power of Visual Thinking [Wired]
  • “In essence, I used “visual thinking”—drawing pictures to solve a problem. And if you believe the visualization experts, a new language of pictures may be precisely what we need to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.”

“Data is the new soil…if you look at it directly it’s just a load of numbers and disconnected facts…but if you start working with it in a certain way interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed”

• Map your moves [Moritz Stefaner]
  • “A visual exploration of where New Yorkers moved in the last decade”
  Queens Metropolitan Campus [Pentagram]
  • “…Scher has merged her environmental graphics and painting to create a remarkable new work: a pair of murals at the new Queens Metropolitan Campus in Forest Hills, which includes Queens Metropolitan High School and the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a middle school.”
  London Design Festival Debate: Products, People and Punk [Guardian]
  • “London design festival director Ben Evans takes on the curator of the Anti-Design festival, Neville Brody, to debate the state of British design with guardian.co.uk’s arts editor, Andrew Dickson”
  Interview with Massimo Vignelli [Design Observer]
  • “So what is design all about? It is to decrease the amount of vulgarity in the world. It is to make the world a better place to be. But everything is relative. There is a certain amount of latitude between what is good, what is elegant, and what is refined that can take many, many manifestations. It doesn’t have to be one style. We’re not talking about style, we’re talking about quality. Style is tangible, quality is intangible. I am talking about giving to everything that surrounds us a level of quality.”
  What does the filler text “lorem ipsum” mean? [The Straight Dope]
  • “Lorem ipsum is the beginning of a pseudo-Latin passage commonly used as placeholder text when a graphic designer dummies up a page layout. It’s intended to show how the type will look before the copy is available…Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. “