TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF

Got described over the weekend as…

“the air freshener in a room that just been shat in”

Thank you kindly!

for example, hearing your voice on microphone you always hate it, but it doesn’t sound like what you hear in your head, so how do we know that what we see in the mirror is what others see, Do we really see ourselves in our reflections like people see us?

Nicholas Felton

Nicholas Felton’s fifth report on his daily activities is an elegant, crowd-sourced set of infographics:

Nicholas Felton is an infographic designer whom earlier this year he released his fifth annual report, the culmination of yet another year’s worth of data accretion and (according to his Facebook status) well over 200 hours of labor. With The 2009 Feltron Annual Report, Felton stepped up his game a sizable notch by creating his first ever crowd-sourced report, enlisting the help of relatives, friends, colleagues and even his dentist.

Calling daily on the people he met who he felt “had discerned enough of my personality and activities” to submit a record of the encounter through an online survey, the designer tracked responses and used his own subjective analysis to come up with the data set. While Felton acknowledges the variations in accuracy his methods produce, he exlpains that he “strived to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected. ”

Felton also notes that the volume of data was so unwieldy it could have easily spiraled into several more reports. To manage all of the information (and keep his sanity), he enlisted the help of such tools asProcessing and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The final product once again makes an intriguingly elegant representation of an individual’s activities over the course of a year —this time recorded under the surveillance of his peers

Swayspace in Brooklyn, NY is making a letterpresss edition of 16-page the report. using four colors on 80-pound French Durotone cover stock. Individually numbered, signed and mailed in March, you can pre-order the printed report for $20 from the Feltron shop.

His use of infographics and type are spot on, these beautifully designed pieces got me thinking I wouldn’t mind attempting this for myself infographically.

Visual Miscellaneum

The Visual Miscellaneum Book - DAVID McCANDLESS

For those drowning in the digital age’s information glut, “Visual Miscellaneum,” the new eye-popping book of infographics by London-based visual and data journalistDavid McCandless, makes the perfect antidote. Forget about pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and histograms; the book showcases McCandless’ dexterity when it comes to the infinite number of ways to represent data through engaging graphics these days.

While some books open with a dedication to a loved one, an esteemed colleague or a revered legend, the author dedicates Visual Miscellaneum “to the beautiful internet.” And no wonder, the internet both inspires and confounds with its labyrinthine paths and bottomless rabbit holes—it also provides most of the source data for the visualizations in this book.

Those interested in getting a taste of David’s work can follow his blog Information is Beautiful.

Stephen King Posters

Illustrator Nick Tassone’s elegantly disturbing screen prints interpret the King of horror’s classic flicks…

Providing a fresh take on Stephen King’s classically twisted words, graphic designer Nick Tassone evokes the spirit of the disturbing films with a set of movie posters that perfectly illustrate each daunting plot.

Tassone cuts out the gore and reduces each image down to an essential stylized symbol, using a two-color palette of black paired with a pastel. For “Carrie,”

These condensed interpretations reinforce King’s ability to create intelligible stories, easily recognized even years after they were originally published.

Adding a layer of detail to play up a bygone tone, the vintage-inspired graphics include scratches and imperfections. The simplicity of Tassone’s design lends a familiar Hitchcockian dread and unease, making for an ultimately creepy yet visually-pleasing poster.

Significance of numbers

So today was our first and final crit for our “significance of numbers” brief. For this brief we where asked to design an A2 poster on the significance of numbers, Its a really open brief, which I really enjoyed the broadness of. The brief helped me get back into thinking mode after the long summer holiday.

After a lot of brainstorming and throwing round ideas, I had the realisation of the fact our identities (visually and personally) are based up of thousands of numbers ie, height, weight, shoe size etc, or bank account details, passwords, serial codes etc. Which are all unique to us.

For this I decided to create a typographic piece of work using all the numbers I had found out, the numbers I used were all my personal numbers from my age to my passport number, finding out these numbers took up a lot of my time as this was only a week long project, but i got there in the end…

Baring in mind, typographically this still needs work, I think the poster explains its self well enough to not need an explanation on the poster its self. I think if I end up using it else where I will include a small blurb explaining the direction in which i was going to prevent any future queries.

This image is showing the colours and placement in which I have used.

As the way I chose to answer this brief was to do with uniqueness and identity i decided to place the thumb print in the most random place possible on the page for an effective composition. If you where to measure from each side of the print to the edge of the paper no horizontal or vertical line length would be the same.

“Variety in spacing, just as in life, adds spice. Visual variety allows the eye to play. Play encourages exploration. Exploration draws the viewer in.”- Jim Krause

coolhunting.com

Coolhunting.com has been taking a lot of my time lately, so Im sure there will be more posts to follow on some of the amazing designs I found/continue to find there.

To kick start it though this is a clever map substituting typography for topography by the design duo Bold & Noble.

Ingeniously charting Anglophone countries with city names written in their correct geographical location,Bold & Noble’s striking maps are a typographic puzzle that stimulate the eye as well as the mind. The U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and a detailed London are each transcribed, with various font weights drawing attention to the major destinations.

Vanity Barcodes

Created by the senior editor of The Dieline, Vanity Barcodes is a site which features boring old barcodes in distorted, illustrative forms.

The idea is to show a crucial part of packaging in a new light. The best part of this is that the barcodes actually work and would assist a product greatly with their innovative designs.

I came across these on a friends blog while studying numbers in great detail for a project i was doing and thought they were pretty interesting.