matthewlittlemore.com

There are lots of incredible generative data visualisation pieces around at the moment, and some great inspiration for the forthcoming Creative Flows project. With our group already having an idea of what we are trying to achieve, some examples on the net seemed to immediately jump out as a benchmark.

Being very much a graphic design influenced team, the visual aesthetic was discussed almost before the actual concept. Digg BigSpy feeds the most popular stories ‘Dug’ by users and is definately close to how I imagine the news feed type aesthetic for our project. I like the minimal use of colour, varying type size and immediacy of the scrolling info as it comes in.

As we will be using RSS feeds, I also note RSS voyage by Andy Biggs. It’s a really immersive way of displaying usually linear snippets of info. You can integrate your own personal RSS feeds and browse them while you zoom in and out. As we intend to create a piece which requires no interaction but generates the visualisation automatically voyage will not be so much an influence directly, but I really like the smooth 3D space.

The NBC tweet tracker is also worth pointing out, as it is employing a similar approach to our own project. Using a more obviously accesible interface the most tweeted strories appear as larger images. Our Flow project will be a more abstract (and hopefully more indicative of the frenzy of ‘chat’ around olympic stories) version of this concept.

It is also worth watching Hans Rosling’s funny and engaging talk on the importance and future of data visualisation of publicly funded information
and his website www.gapminder.org