The Web 2.0 Summit Map - The Data Frame
We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more. Welcome to the 2011 edition of the Web 2.0 Map. This map showcases the incumbents and upstarts in our network economy, gathered around various territories that represent the Web 2.0's Points of Control. We've removed last year's acquisition mode to make room for a newly minted data layer. Pan and Zoom to explore the map, and click the icons to get some insight about each player and their position. Then, turn on the comments view or data layer to discuss the map with others and add your own ideas! Also, bring the conversation to Twitter using hashtag #w2smap. New! Get details on the creation of the data layer on the Web 2.0 Summit Blog. Please jump in, the water's fine! Click an existing comment bubble to join in, or click 'Start New Discussion' to start your own! Click the spot on the map where you'd like to place your new city. Click the logos at top right to turn the movement layers on and off.
What if famous brands had regular fonts? RegulaBrands - Pixelonomics
Jan62012 EmailEmail What if famous brands had regular fonts? - RegulaBrands Last week, I was having a skype call with a friend in Italy, who also happens to be a communication designer. Call it coincidence, fate or a mutual observation, we both have been asked the same question time and again, by our clients. The common ones are “all my office computers have Arial. “I thought logos are always Times New Roman” “My daughter loves Comic Sans!” To sum up all the versions of this typical query and deliver it into a simple sentence, it would be, “why can’t we use a standard font for our logo?” This is where I decided to do a simple exercise to recreate famous brands using regular fonts, to “RegulaBrands”. Please be honest and have a look at these 12 recreated brands. IBM recreated using Rockwell Bold Puma recreated using Helvetica Neue Condensed Black Vogue recreated using Times New Roman Coca-Cola recreated using Mistral Blackberry recreated using Arial Bold Italic Swatch recreated using Helvetica Neue
Rectangular subdivisions of the world
Eric Fischer, who continues his string of mapping fun and doesn't even do it for his day job, maps the world in binary subdivisions. Each bounding box contains an equal number of geotagged tweets. The best part is that Fischer is actually doing some problem-solving, trying to figure something out, so it's not just a pretty picture. The actual motivation behind it, by the way, was to figure out an approximately optimal set of bounding boxes to query for in APIs like Picasa's, where if you ask for the whole world, you only get a few, very recent, results, but if you query for small enough bounding boxes, you can see further back in time. The idea is to choose bounding boxes with equal frequency so you get approximately the same time period of results from each of them. Here's the image zoomed in on the United States. As does the view of Europe: More maps from Fischer here. [Binary subdivision of the world via @datapointed]
10 Essential Books on Typography
by Maria Popova What Arab culture has to do with industrial ideals, midcentury design and Victorian hand-lettering. Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty. In 1967, iconic typography pioneer Emil Ruder penned Typographie: A Manual of Design — a bold deviation from the conventions of his discipline and a visionary guide to the rules of his new typography. Images via Display In an age when we frequently encounter the Middle East in the course of our daily media diets, our true knowledge of the region remains impoverished amidst these often limited, one-note and reductionist portrayals. Our full review, with more images, here. Did I love this book?
Mapping Stereotypes Project by alphadesigner
Get your copy on: Amazon US / Amazon UK / Amazon DE / Amazon FR / Amazon IT / Amazon ES / Amazon Canada / Amazon Japan / Amazon India / Amazon Brazil Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map Collection
Cultural Connectives: Understanding Arab Culture Through Typography
by Maria Popova What typography has to do with cross-cultural understanding and linguistic minimalism. I’m obsessed with language, such a crucial key to both how we understand the world and how the world understands us. In today’s political and media climate, we frequently encounter the Middle East in the course of our daily media diets, but these portrayals tend to be limited, one-note and reductionist. We know precious little about Arab culture, with all its rich and layered multiplicity, and even less about its language. On the heels of last month’s excellent Arabic Graffiti comes Cultural Connectives — a cross-cultural bridge by way of a typeface family designed by author Rana Abou Rjeily that brings the Arabic and Latin alphabets together and, in the process, fosters a new understanding of Arab culture. The book jacket unfolds into a beautiful poster of a timeless quote by Gibran Khalil Gibran, rendered in Arabic: Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool.
The Google Map of the 19th Century - Megan Garber - Technology
It seems like the quintessentially contemporary phenomenon: the pedestrian, walking along, distracted from his surroundings by the glow of the map in his smartphone. But there have been some oblivious palm-gazers, it turns out, since long before Steve Jobs came along. In London, during the Great Exhibition of 1851, the merchant George Shove designed a ladylike accessory that would allow its wearer to navigate, discreetly and easily, the fair's Hyde Park environs. The proto-mobile map! Subtle and delightful! Alas -- for both ladies of London and for fans of quirky tech -- "as far as we know, the glove was never produced commercially," notes the UK National Archives's Andrew Janes. The "handy map" idea lived on, though: In the early 20th century, some especially sprawl-y cities began to publicize their geographical wonders with maps that were, wittily and a little bit weirdly, drawn on hands. Images: The UK National Archives.
How Cloud Computing Made Web Typography Better For Everyone | Co. Design
What’s makes sites like A Working Library and Pictory stand out from the pack in terms of readability? Clear, humane typography, of course. But what makes that possible? Web fonts: legally-licensed real typefaces dynamically served via "the cloud" using Javascript and CSS. Sound like Greek to you? Me too. Before Typekit, what options did a web designer have for incorporating imaginative typography into her site designs? Before web fonts, type designers offered desktop font licenses that web designers could use to replace fonts on the web: either as static images, or (if permitted by the license) via Flash or JavaScript techniques like sIFR and Cufon. [Samples on Typekit’s website for Museo Slab, our own headline typeface] That said, a lot of really interesting work went into those techniques, and they were formative experiments in web type. What about type designers: before Typekit, how did they get paid when web designers would use their work? [Top image by Kevin Dooley]
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^^ Communist World, 2011 by Theo Deutinger & Catarina Dantas [Mark#30]. <Communism is still alive. Although capitalism won a victory when the Berlin Wall went down, communism is triumphing as nation states continue to bail out banks in the wake of the recent economic crisis. vs. ^ McWorld, 2006 by OMA/AMO, Theo Deutinger & Bea Ramo. ^ Avoid the Center, 2008 by Theo Deutinger & Theresia Kohlmayr [Mark#15].
