This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.
There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.
I wish more publishers and services took this approach to evaluating technology:
We scrutinize third-party services before including them in our articles or elsewhere on our site. Many include trackers or analytics that would collect data on our readers. These may be standard across much of the web, but we don’t use them.
A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:
It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.
A free PDF with five articles:
Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.
An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!
Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
I’m finding this tool to be very useful for the kind of chaotic mind-mapping I do when I’m preparing a conference talk.
The design history of the New York subway map.
A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
Minimalist cartography.