Hand-made visualization tool-kit

With it you can make any kind of graphics including: abstracts maps and diagrams, area graphs and charts, arrow diagrams, bar graphs, venn diagrams, time line charts, bubble graphs, circle diagramas, proportional charts, organization charts, and really, whatever you want.

Sarah Cohen, a Knight professor at Duke University and former reporter at the Washington Post, and Visual Hint bring you Time Flow. Time Flow:

rethink[s] timelines, striving to always show as much textual detail about the data as possible…

TimeFlow offers five different viewing options: timeline, calendar, bar chart, table and list. There is also considerable flexibility in filtering values, combining filters, and re-arranging points on the screen.

Great idea and good to see Calais grow from black-ops internal project to an open-API service.

Big congrats to the Roundarch team for launching the Bloomberg Sports fantasy football app. The visualizations are beautiful and the whole UI is easy-as-pie. I conducted the draft for my fantasy league last night and immediately referred to the app to see who I should start week 1. Now let’s see if it’s accurate! Great job Mulvey and the rest of the Roundarch team!

From an info aesthetics article…

This reminds me of a flex-coded, corporate version the machine in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Only with fewer ants creating the special sauce (sorry for the spoiler but I think 12 years is past the statute of limitations). Seriously though, data-mining and trend-spotting algorithms are big business in todays T.I.A. world. And that’s fine – the data’s out there let’s make sense of it. But exploring “the past, present and predicted future of almost anything”? You’re gonna need the ants on this one because there’s nothing mystifying about a plain vanilla flex skin with cloud tags and timeline scrubbers. Here’s an example of where good brand & interaction design could help bring the truly special information (if there is any) to the user with maximum impact.

Big Bang is a new trend map from iA – the same folks that brought us the Web Trend Map poster series. This sucker takes a look at a level abstracted from actual domains – social networks.

I particularly enjoyed this quote:

Since twitter is becoming an alternative web protocol that—together with facebook—gets close and closer to replacing the domain/search paradigm, we decided to make an info graphic that shows how and through whom Twitter developed into what it is now, close to its 4th birthday.

Right on. I really get annoyed at people who facebook me before (or without) emailing. I don’t mean to sound like a Luddite, but come on. i like my email program better than facebook messaging. I can sort, search, archive locally. If we want to abandon email for facebook then at least the facebook devs can have the decency to provide their messaging service API.

But I digress. Seriously though, check out their description:

We call it Big Bang. It shows the explosive development of Twitter since the beginning from its center (birth) with two people to its edges (today) with 75 Million people. Well aware that a big paper thin disc it’s probably going to be a bitch to print and a big pain to put the wall—we are still going to try to print it circle round. Please don’t faint just yet.

Sounds rad – can’t wait to see it.

Absolutely beautiful personal data visualizations are now available to view in Feltron’s 2009 Annual Report. Don’t forget to buy a copy. Someone tell Mulvey his designer-crush just turned a new page (literally).

Older Magnetosphere/Turbulence/Nebula render from flight404 on Vimeo.

Checking out the redesign of flight 404, I came across this on Vimeo. Wow.

Great looking data visualization of parliamentary salary normalized across different countries. I especially like that rotation correlated to “good government”, though I’d take issue with where the United States is positioned. By Shake Up Media.