Greater Than Or Equal To » info visualization

Posters from books

Alan Trotter — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:02:27 +0000

This is all great stuff, and I want to see more of this. Publishers, get on it. From Penguin, two posters of the fantastic covers for the new set of Penguin Deluxe Classics:

Poster from cover of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, art by Tony Millionaire

Poster from cover of White Noise by Don Delillo, art by Michael Cho, design by Paul Buckley

Then the very delightful design blog Kitsune Noir has begun the Kitsune Noir Poster Club by asking five artists to produce a poster based on a book they love. The results of which include another take on Moby Dick:

Poster inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, by Mark Weaver

But I think my two favourites are these, coming from opposite ends of the austerity scale:

Poster inspired by David Foster Wallace’s Infinte Jest, by Cody Hoyt

Poster inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, by Jez Burrows

The other two titles are Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

And then there’s Penguin designer and, more importantly, ≥ regular Stefanie Posavec, who has a print at 20x200. It’s based on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and uses the same technique to visualize the text as she’s used before for On the Road.

Walter Benjamin: A Literary Organism Analysis print, by Stefanie Posavec

I am wishing I had more money right now.

Guys.

Send me money.

There goes the empire

Alan Trotter — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:37:11 +0000

A fun piece of information visualization: four great empires of the 19th and 20th centuries (British, Spanish, Portugese and French) are represented by coloured dots, the size of the dots representing that empire’s territorial extent. As the empires grow the dots bulge, but as we approach modernity there’s not nearly as much growth as there is dissolution, and the dots blister and then burst as territories achieve independence.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

It’s attractive and strangely dramatic, if not particularly informative, and I don’t meant that as a terrible criticism. In fact, Pedro M. Cruz, the creator doesn’t consider it either a piece of information visualization or “information art. Either way sounds too pretentious — as the visuals are not very sophisticated or elegant, and the way that the information is treated doesn’t enable the extraction of advanced knowledge.” And I’m sure he’d know better than me.

Still kind of fun though!

(via kottke)

Left vs Right – in which I make clever use of the word Sinister and have way too much class to draw anyone’s attention to it

Alan Trotter — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:19:29 +0000

It turns out that this striking visualization of the differences between the political left and right that I had admired and saved to enjoysthin.gs is also the work of Stefanie Posavec, the designer at Penguin responsible for the Great Stars series.

I know this because her name is on the chart, and she’s clearly credited at Information is Beautiful where I saw the chart. And also because, after I had missed these telltale signs, Stefanie told me it was her.

Here are a few details, but you should just go and look at the whole glorious spread.

To my mind, as well as being extremely visually elegant, it’s an intelligent attempt to simplify some very complicated (perceived) distinctions. Yes it’s reductive and doubtless deals in generalisations, but for a single image and no more than a few hundred words of copy, it’s a provocative and honest effort. But, this being the internet, there are commenters decrying it for being insultingly left-centric, seeing it as a sinister plot to confound more nuanced debate, and plenty who want it to be something it isn’t.

No it doesn’t accurately represent the whole spectrum of political thought. Did you really think it could?

It’s taken from David McCandless’s upcoming book The Visual Miscellaneum, so look out for that.