Best of the visualisation web… August 2012

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter you will see many of these items shared as soon as I find them.

This was a slightly quieter month than normal (holidays, the world’s focus on the Olympics) so here’s a single collection from August 2012:

Moebio | Santiago performs one of his classic imaginative visualisation experiments using FatFonts (don’t use if you’ve got a headache!) | Experiment

The Functional Art | Features the video ‘Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See’, the documentary produced by Edward Tufte and his wife | Video

Stamen | Another month, another map rendering from the giants of the game, Stamen – this time is ‘Burning Maps’ | Mapping

Eddie.io | Exploring a range of different visualisations around tv, film or other cinematic/moving images | Article/collection

datavisualization.ch | Narrative of the design process behind the winning entry to visualizing.org’s Olympics viz contest | Narrative

Eager Eyes | Critical review from Robert following his attendance at Edward Tufte’s one day training course | Article

Visual.ly | Very good article on the different design options for creating interactive visualisations | Article

emoto | A collection of all the blog posts emerging from the incredible emoto project, providing analysis around the sentiment from tweets about the Olympics | Article

Wired | Fascinating sculpture made by an electric saw introduced to a pile of Wired magazines | Sculpture

New York Times | Interactive slideshow from the NYT about the rise of Olympic stars through twitter | Interactive/Slideshow

Washington Post | Interesting analysis by WaPo on the age distribution of Olympians in different sports | Interactive

Charts’n'things | A number of great process narratives behind the exceptional series of Olympics graphics produced by the New York Times: Sketches from One Race, Every Medalist Ever, Why Amanda Cox should be in charge of audio, Shifts in rankings and All the passes – U.S. women’s soccer | Narratives

Think Datavis | Displaying the average longitude/latitude of medals won from the 2012 London Summer Olympics | Visualisation

The Functional Art | Alberto discussed visual poetry and information graphics | Article

BBC | An interesting white paper published in February from the BBC R&D department titled ‘Sports TV Applications of Computer Vision’ | Paper

Column Five | Another interesting interview with the peerless Nigel Holmes on his 50 years of designing infographics | Interview

BBC Click | Article about the ‘age of information overload’ | Article

Colour Lovers | A Visual History of Colour in Movie Posters | Gallery

New York Times | Drought and Deluge in the Lower 48 | Interactive

New York Times | Another view of the drought situation in the US | Interactive

Visual Loop | Interview with the one and only Santiago Ortiz | Interview

Guardian Datablog | Initial analysis from the great data release made available by Manchester City FC | Interactive

extent (PNW) | Mapping the streets of Portland using colour patterns for the address numbers | Visualisation

FastCo Design | “Hate Your Office? Take A Look At Some Of The World’s Most Creative Work Spaces” | Gallery

Wired | Article about Tableau ‘Tableau Software: Dataviz with a Pixar touch’ | Article

Distant Shape | Fascinating visualisation which analyses Apple’s transition from desktop to mobile based on ‘Daring Fireball’ article subjects | Article

School of Data | Report on a workshop that took place in India | Article

Periscopic | A great (and occasionally depressing) work to explore the different ages that people achieved great things in film, music and writing | Interactive

Timely Portfolio | Comprehensive piece about horizon graphs, including Mike Bostock video and different approaches | Article

Chengyin | WhatFont tool helps you determine the type or font used on web page – brilliantly useful | Tool

e-flux | Great idea, to bring together examples of projects that never saw the light of day – ‘A call for unrealized projects’ | Article

Silicon Angle | “Data Art vs. Visualization? The Distinction is Unproductive, says Artist Jer Thorp [Q&A]” | Interview

NPR | ‘Wildfire danger’ – map showing current large wildfires and forecast burning conditions in the lower 48 states | Interactive

UX Blog | Hurricanes since 1851 | Article

O’Reilly Strata | ‘Lies, damn lies, and visualizations: The intersection – and accompanying questions – of data science and journalism’ | Article

Mashable | How NASA Makes Scientific Data Beautiful | Article

The Listening Machine | ‘The Listening Machine is an automated system that generates a continuous piece of music based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the United Kingdom’ | Audio/Visualisation

Cooper | Interesting take: ‘The best interface is no interface’ | Article

FastCo Design | Useful tips for startups on an important issue in business – avoiding being screwed over | Article

Washington Post | Political Geography of the GOP convention floor | Infographic

Creative Bits | The art of animation and motion graphics | Video