Just found out about Political Streams.
I really do like this idea, but reinventing the pie chart with those desaturated squares is not a good start. I’ll be checking it out to see how they iterate on representing the concept, which is fascinating.
It mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all on one screen, lets you see the relative popularity of any given story, whether it’s trending up or down, and tracks the number of mentions of the people and places mentioned in the story.
The graphs, by contrast are wonderful and straightforward:
oh and cf. Microsoft Blews (TM) which has similar data (and infoviz problems).
While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.
Lately I’ve been volunteering a little bit for Ushahidi. After a few months of work, we have gotten a new wireframe of the mobile app running on the iPhone. Ushahidi is an open source tool for monitoring crises and disasters. It recently won the the NetSquared challenge and was called one of the top startups to watch in the MIT Technology Review. Man, I really don’t have to give up anything to work on this one — it’s really a top notch operation going on. Other nonprofit and open source teams could learn a lot from the Ushahidi project.
Some of the amazing things about the Ushahidi project include:
- Participatory design. Everyone is invited to comment on these designs and hack on the psd files we created.
- Rapid prototyping. (Really rapid: the first version of the app was built in a weekend.)
- The application is completely open source.
- It’s a platform, not a web application: you can get the code and extend it for your own uses.
- Strong user-centered design principles.
- Great attention to detail in the design and insistence on top-notch interfaces (including the marketing website and the admin pages of the application).
Anyway here’s the latest mockup. Here’s the latestsource PSD. It’s v0.2 and still has a long way to go. We did the iPhone app first and will be using lessons learned from this one to port the project to other platforms.
I did most of the sketching and developed the concepts that were flying around, and then my man Joe Jones did all the real work in Photoshop. It’s been a really fun time so far and I am looking forward to implementing some of the changes being discussed on the Ushahidi blog.
Also make sure you check out some of the geniuses behind the project:
Kenyan Pundit
White African
Afromusing
Mentalacrobatics
Smartly presented information is a nonprofit’s best friend. If you can’t communicate the problem, no one is going to give a damn. Hash’s blog just pointed me to some powerful charts Sokwanele mapping project , which I’ve mentioned previously. These charts are extremely important data to have in the public domain, and it’s great that they
appear well-executed and polished, with a high resolution of visual information.
Google Charts from Sokwanele and Mobile Researcher
The charts at Mobile Researcher also caught my eye recently (also pictured, at right and bottom). Turns out they were both made with Google Charts. I hadn’t used it before, but I recognized their densely set labels and had some vague ideas that there was a Ruby wrapper. And I just thought that the Mobile Researcher charts were really beautiful. Turns out it’s super easy. There are plenty of libraries for managing the requests to the API, and, in some simple cases you can even code it by hand, since all of the code is simply passed through a query tag on an image url.
What it does do is proved fodder for organizations inside and out to make an even stronger case against this repressive regime.
- Erik Hersman @ whiteafrican.com
But in most of the cases the data is hashed somehow with javascript, since urls can only be so long. Since I was working in a Rails app, I used a great ruby library and was up and running very quickly. I wholeheartedly recommend them anytime you need simple, sharp graphics to illustrate your research. If you have a web app or with dynamic charts, it’s a no-brainer, since generating images is relatively intensive memory-wise.
All this is to say that something like this:
< img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chd=t:6,2,6,4,2,4,7,3,4,2,3,4
&chco=0077CC&chs=120x40&cht=ls" />
Turns into this:
Or you can abstract the access to make it easier with a library like this with a method like this:
#usage
google_pie('val1', 'val2', 'val3')
#method
def google_pie(*args)
size = "250x100"
url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?"
return < img src=\"#{Gchart.pie_3d( :background => ‘E9E7DD’, :size => ‘300×80′, :data => *args)} \” />
end
But the API of course is language neutral, and I am sure it would be just as easy in most any language. Oh, and it’s free! (Though capped at 10k charts per day … which would be a good problem to have, I suppose.)
I’ve never seen gadget hype reach the levels that have been achieved by the iPhone. And I’ve never been so caught up in it myself. After visiting eyesondarfur.org I’ve decided that I’m giving my iPhone budget to Amnesty International: $50 a month over the next year.
In the culture jamming spirit I spliced an iPhone ad into one of the arresting images from the book Darfur: Twenty Years of War and Genocide in Sudan. I’m not anti-iPhone in particular: I just want to remind folks (especially myself) that there are more important things to focus on than the gadgets being thrust in your face.
If you have the luxury of a budget for consumer electronics, why not consider putting just a percentage of it toward something like an anti-genocide campaign?
[image: The Kalma Camp, Darfur, by Pep Bonet/Panos Pictures and the iPhone by Apple Inc. Used without permission: Please don't sue me.]
The Darfur Wall is a beautifully executed charity project that fills a very simple, traditional purpose (collecting money) using an innovative and stark interface. The black and white, no-images design reinforces the tragedy of the situation without being overwhelming. I think this is a great example of online design serving a progressive cause — which is not so easy to find.
John Maeda writes thoughtfully about simplicity and design at his MIT-based blog. He just posted a great bit about Paul Polak’s design for a low-resouce flashlight. Design under difficult conditions can lead to the same creative insight as design on a limitless budget.
“… this prototype flashlight that is completely solar powered (recharged in sunlight), easily constructed from common off-the-shelf parts, and can last for well over a decade of use.
Wow. Steve at Slayeroffice.com has an amazing color palette generator based on the design technique of Andy Clark.
You enter a hex code value for a color, then another to mix it with, and out comes a beautiful png graphic of the color scheme. Extremely nice work, Steve. This is a great resource for brainstorming color schemes. I’ve used a number of other methods, but this one gets the prize.
< >
Ok, so the color palette generator at wellstyled (shown) is even better.
I still recommend one extension of the techniques: take a scheme you like and use Photoshop to adjust the hue locally, and generate as many versions as you need (perhaps for clients or your boss). Then it’s even easier to get ideas. If your’e a new web designer, that’s a good enough reason on its own to downlo ad a trial of Photoshop, I think.
Recently in my commutes to work I’ve been using these incredible flash-based, interactive representations of development statistics. (Don’t worry, I ride the bus.) These modules, created by a Swedish group called Gapminder, are attractively designed and highly educational. I have long been a great fan of sharp design in the interest of development. These are as great a communication tool as I have ever seen.
From the Gapminder website:
“Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualize human development. … It all started in 1998 from an idea to enhance the understanding of world health. We developed prototype software showing time series of health statistics as moving graphics and varying life conditions as 360¬? photo panoramas from homes, schools and health facilities. From the prototype emerged the Dollar Street project with Save the Children Fund in Sweden and the World Health Chart project with WHO. Within the later project Gapminder developed the free software Trendalyzer that turns boring time series of development statistics into attractive moving graphics. “
Drosphilia researchers have a leg up on web designers.
Well, at least they’ve got a decent explanation of colorblindness. A short paper on colorblind audiences was written a few years ago for researchers presenting their findings on the very latest in the world of flies. The guidelines are easy to understand, and the changes are easy to incorporate.
Here’s a bit:
“There are always colorblind people among the audience and readers. There should be more than TEN colorblinds in a room with 250 people. (50% male and 50% female) There is a good chance that the paper you submit may go to colorblind reviewers. Supposing that your paper will be reviewed by three white males (which is not unlikely considering the current population in science), the probability that at least one of them is colorblind is whopping 22%! … When preparing your presentations (papers, slides, web pages etc.), please take this into account. Here are some comments on how to make figures and presentations colorblind friendly.
I would also recommend a quick look at the Ishihara test for colorblindness for a shot-in-the arm understanding.
And while you’re on a colorblindness kick, you’ll lose blogger points if you don’t read at least Day 12 of the Dive Into Accessibility website, which is the best online introduction to making your website+blog readable by everyone, except illiterates, period.
Stock photography is pretty essential for web developers and designers. If your organization doesn’t have a large budget for that kind of thing (stock photos are $50-$250, usually), there are a few alternatives with a decent selection — and the pictures are only a few bucks, if not free.
The best of these new, inexpensive resources is called iStock Photo. Prices are about $2, depending on the resolution you need. They have the best selection of people-pics, which are more expensive because of the model releases required. Their photos come in three sizes: those that are suitable for the web, those for small print, and high-resolution images for large-format printing jobs. www.istock.com
Another good one is the Stock Exchange, which is actually free. They have fewer pictures of people, fewer high-quality pictures and no ability to choose lower resolution. But it’s free, so start your search there. http://www.sxc.hu
Another free one is the Morgue File, a “public image reference archive.” Lots of old newspaper pictures that have entered the public domain. Occasionally you will find what you need here, but it doesn’t have a great selection. www.morguefile.com
For more interesting backgrounds and textures and artsy work, visit: http://www.imageafter.com/
If you really need a good picture invest in something from www.corbis.com
Stephen Pinker writes in his book How Minds Work that “the emotions are mechanisms that set the brains highest-level goals.” This, it seems, is a good description of why small, mission-driven nonprofits exist despite the innumerable difficulties of keeping such an operation afloat. It’s also an essential idea to consider when advertising your organization.
People are drawn to imagery and emotions that inspire them to work for a cause. If you have ever been saddled with the task of creating ads or promotional material for your organization, you would do well to keep these emotions — not facts about your job or accomplishments — at the front of your mind.
This concept is just one idea among many in an immensely useful e-book published a couple of years ago by Cause Communications called Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes. It should be in every nonprofit office (unless you have the luxury of an ad department to think about such things). It covers broad ideas like the above, but it also goes into detail about using layout and text to keep people reading and engaged in your message. And it has great reviews of nonprofit ads over the last 10 years. It is, in short, an eminently readable advertising textbook for nonprofits; check it out before your next ad deadline.
