Jumping Fox » Eric Auld

CNN redesigns

Eric Auld — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:06:14 +0000

Read a deconstruction of the relaunched CNN site. The new site sports new index pages, story pages and a strong focus on ‘popularity’ with the News Pulse section.

The future of documentaries?

Eric Auld — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:35:39 +0000

This amazing project on Cali produced by the newspaper El Pais, contains video, galleries, maps and infographics. While a great immersive experience for the user, this won’t be the future for all online news as the production cost and time would never make it viable.

Visualising the developing world

Eric Auld — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:01:30 +0000

This TED talk by Hans Rosling is an excellent example of how powerful data and good story telling can explain more in 20 minutes than words, photos, multimedia or video could ever hope too. Hans uses data with the Gapminder system in a presentation to burst myths about the developing world and prove that the developing world is not who you think it is.

The data and the journalist

Eric Auld — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:56:15 +0000

How is the role of traditional journalism changing as more easy to use raw data sets become available for free online, allowing a greater range of users to data mine the content? 10,000 Words have a good introduction to some of the changes and implications.

Principles of perception

Eric Auld — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:00:17 +0000

Over the past 9 months Andy Rutledge has been composing a series of articles on the Gestalt Principles of Perception. Andy’s articles are well written, easy to read and demonstrate the principles clearly with good examples on how they relate to web design. These are the principles that many designers use, even if they are not aware of it; they are well worth the time to read if you are new to design or just looking for a refresher (also see part 2, 3, 4 and 5).

Worth a thousand words

Eric Auld — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:46:49 +0000

Photography plays such an important role in storytelling. Sometimes all you need is a great photo; this list of 20 Photojournalists’ fantastic portfolios proves the point beautifully. Make sure you check out Mustafah Abdulaziz, John Schreiber and Benjamin Lowy from the list.

Good morning

Eric Auld — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:49:57 +0000

‘CreativeMornings‘ is a monthly morning gathering of creative types in New York. Each event includes a 10 minute lecture, followed by a 20 minute group discussion. The New York Times’ Khoi Vinh recently spoke about his early life as a designer and the lessons that he learnt.

Talking re-design

Eric Auld — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 07:48:52 +0000

Designers Prem Krishnamurthy and Rob Giampietro talk about their online design of Tablet Magazine, and the different places they found inspiration to shape the design. Interestingly, during the audio slide show, you get a quick look at the intial three directions they took.

A great introduction

Eric Auld — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:49:45 +0000

Khoi Vinh has linked to a great redesign walkthrough of the new NPR.org site. It is a beautiful piece of video that proves that even somthing like an introduction to a redesign can have a nice narrated story.

It is certainly a great way to embrace your users and hold their hand through what is large number of changes to the site. And by using the voice and face of someone that the listeners and users all know, I can imagine that they won’t be receiving a large backlash to the redesign.

Update

The new NPR.org redesign

The new NPR.org redesign has been launched and is a vast improvement on the previous site. Plus, the NPR blog has a series of posts from the redesign team discussing the changes to processes, tools, and changes that do and do not affect users.

Same data, different stories

Eric Auld — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:21:07 +0000

We all know that data can tell different stories depending on how you spin it and the way data is visually represented can lead to assumptions by the viewer.

Nicholas Rapp has written a post over at his personal blog discussing the creation of a graphic on American vehicle carbon dioxide emissions. The creation of this graphic demonstrates how data can be interpreted in different ways depending on the method that it is displayed.

The first map showing emissions come from major cities

In his post you can see a map of the USA with two versions of the same data overlay; the first has the total emissions per county per year, the second has total emissions per capita per year. The interesting thing is the two stories that the data tell; naturally the first says that all the emissions come from the major cities. But when you look at the second map, there as a noticeable difference in the indicators.

The second map tells a different story

Cities like Los Angeles have a large emission marker on the first version (per county) but a basically non-existent in the second version (per capita). Where as places in the middle of the country have a much larger indicator in the second version. I’m not going to go into what the data is implying (like less people in the country and further to travel etc) but it does demonstrate that from the same data two different stories can be told.

I think it is important to know what story you want to tell when designing a visualisation around data, though sometimes it may not hurt to test the data against some different filters/categories to see if there is something else that maybe more interesting.

Update

Carbon emissions from road transport

Since this post is about vechile carbon emissions, you might like to have a look at a data set The Guardian has released on carbon emmissions from vechiles around the world. From this data they have also produced a really nice clean graphic with the 10 largest polluting countries.