Information Design

A collection of information design resources for students of FA/YSDN 2005 3.0 Information Design, a second-year course in the York University / Sheridan College Program in Design (YSDN).

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The Wheel of Worry

By Andrew Kuo for the NY Times Magazine

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Visualizing 2011

Presenting the year of 2011, brought to you by Visualizing.org. 

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Correlation or Causation?

Need to prove something you already believe? Statistics is easy: All you need are two graphs and a leading question. 

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Animated history of the iPhone

The iPhone might be at the cutting edge of technology but it took a long time and many innovations to get there, take a trip through history and explore the people and technology that contributed to the iPhone becoming what it is today.

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Famous Movie Quotes As Infographics

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Proximity in Design: Why I Can’t Use My Car’s A/C

This enlightening (and entertaining) study of a usability fail proves the case for proximity in establishing clear affordance and mapping in design.

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Writing Without Words

Alexandria Bain, a 4th year YSDN Workshop Student, cites this project as an inspiration in visualizing literary material: 

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Literary Organism from Stefanie Posavec’s Project called ‘Writing Without Words’, which is ‘a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualises the differences in writing styles of various authors.’ Follow the image link to her home page! She is so awesome that I feel quite unoriginal in comparison.

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Good Night and Tough Luck

All kinds of awesome in these low-fi infographics on the importance of sleep, by Christoph Niemann for NYT. 

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vvvv

vvvv is a graphical programming environment for easy prototyping and development. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously. 

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Similar Diversity

Similar Diversity is an information graphic which opens up a new perspective at the topics religion and faith by visualizing the Holy Books of five world religions. Communalities and differences of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are shown up in this datavisualization.

The visual’s basis is an objective text analysis of the Holy Scriptures, and works without any interpretations from the creators’ side. Despite – or even because of this abstraction, the artworks are not only working on an informal but also on an emotional level. The viewers should be inspired to think about own prejudices and current religious conflicts.

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Visual.ly Wants To Make It Easy to Hire Infographic Genius

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How Deadly Is Nuclear Energy?

Seth Godin puts the recent media fear-mongering in its place with a simple infographic: 

Vivid is not the same as true. It's far easier to amplify sudden and horrible outcomes than it is to talk about the slow, grinding reality of day to day strife. That's just human nature. Not included in this chart are deaths due to global political instability involving oil fields, deaths from coastal flooding and deaths due to environmental impacts yet unmeasured, all of which skew it even more if you think about it. This chart unsettles a lot of people, because there must be something wrong with it. Further proof of how easy it is to fear the unknown and accept what we've got. 

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Information graphics in context

Beautiful examples of information design "in context". 

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A Guide to 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time

Websites like this almost make class redundant. Almost. 

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Science Illustrated

Graham Huber presented a talk on information design for the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto: 

Science Illustrated is a two day symposium dedicated to helping early-career scientists (graduate students and post-doctoral fellows) of all disciplines visualize their science better

View videos of all the presentations (with slides). 

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Download  the slidedeck from Alec Singleton's class talk on data visualization. 

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Envisioning the Near Future of Technology

A temporal infographic illustrating current and emerging technologies.