piksels

Today I came across two very noteworthy examples of clever information design which make understanding sets of data both more visual and relative. The best way to grasp what data means is often to put it into perspective with other sets of data so you can easily make a comparison. This is when charts and illustrations quickly become a better data medium than numbers.

How the World Really Shapes Up

The first example takes a map of the world and distorts each region size, relevant to the category it is in. For example, while viewing the map on HIV presence, Africa will be bloated compared to the rest of the world.

See more maps or read more about the project at the UK Daily Mail.

(These maps were produced together by the universities of Michigan and Sheffield)

Size of the Universe

Universcale is a very interactive example of helping us putting into perspective the size of the universe. We quickly can understand how small we are compared to the billions of light years which span across the universe, whilst still being millions of times larger than the building blocks which make up the universe.

(I found Universcale through a design website which I frequently visit, Position Absolute)

Here is a video which also helps us fathom just how large the universe really is

UPDATE: Read the follow up post ‘Adobe’s Listening‘

Every designer reading the title of this post will understand what I am talking about, because we’ve all been there once before.

For obvious reasons most things on the computer are organized using a certain structure, it is just makes sense that way. Bigger to smaller, first to last, newer to older, top to bottom, and so on. Computers usually do a great job at organizing linear data, but when humans become involved with this data it can easily and quickly become a mess.

Try, try, and try again we all seem to end up in this same situation every once and a while. Sure, sometimes we are better at in than other times, and sure we teach ourselves little tricks to help prevent it, but it seems to be a curse which follows us. Sometimes you need to make a simple change to the color of the logo, and 30 minutes later you find yourself with 5 new versions, 3 which you exported to JPG, 2 of which you had to change to RGB to upload to the website, etc. It’s a mess, and there should be an easier way. Sure it’s partially our fault, but I’d rather blame Adobe. Therefore, my open letter to Adobe:

“Dear Adobe,

I’m kind of sitting here online with a couple million designers, and we think you should fix this.

Love,
Designers”

My proposal:

Every project we work on should be a single master file. This master file will act as a container, in which every version, revision, edition, etc will be found.

Here is a basic version of what should be in the file

The project file should allow the user to open the file and view snapshots of each file revision, that way it will be easy for us to know which one to open, and to have a quick overview of all of the designs, version history, etc.

Similar to Adobe’s approach to PDFs, they should make an application (similar to Adobe Reader) to view these project files without having to purchase Adobe CS3 software, or even open it (darn loading times!).

Let’s call this Adobe ProjectReader, for now =)

ProjectReader would be a simplified yet extended version of Adobe Bridge. It should allow us to quickly browse through project files, compare them, and export files to necessary formats.

For example, I recently made a logo for a client, and upon delivery of the final version, I ended up sending him a plethora of files (AI, JPGs both large and small, both RGB and CMYK, TIFF, and PDFS), obviously they were neatly categorized in folders, and so on, but we should be able to overcome problems like these with a simple application.

Imagine how convenient it would be, if you could send your client a single master which he then will be able to export to any necessary format, whether it be a .PDF for easy printing or a small RGB JPG for online use.

But it will take a while for my dream software, ProjectReader, to come out… until then, what are your tips for file naming?

UPDATE: Read the follow up post ‘Adobe’s Listening‘

For me (and for most people) Google Analytics is mainly just a tool to see how many hits we are getting, where they are coming from, etc. It is a shame because if anyone takes a couple extra minutes to really look at what its telling us, we can actually learn something about our visitors.

Here’s a chart showing where Piksel’s visitors are coming from.

It’s no surprise that they majority of users are coming from the social news network Digg. Being ‘dugg’ can send a site tens of thousands of visitors within a matter of hours, but to no surprise, the page hits won’t last for long, and after 2-3 days the typical digg users will be long gone. From the thousands of digg visitors, you would be lucky to even have 1% return to your site. If someone were to ask whether I preferred 10,000 digg visitors or 1,000 StumbleUpon visitors, I would have to go with the StumbleUpon. And here’s why:

Above is a chart showing the time the users spent on the site, and how many of them stayed on the site and viewed more pages. Although digg users come in large volumes, they clearly spend the least amount of time on the site. While in complete contrast, StumbleUpon users spend noticeably more time on the site, and are more likely to browse more than one page of your site.

Don’t get me wrong, the being ‘dugg’ is great (as long as your server stays up). It gives you exposure, it gets you out there, and everyone knows that with such a large amount of traffic there are bound to be visitors which will come back. But in the end it is a question of quality vs quantity. Do you want your visitors to take their time to read it, or do you want to get as many advertisement clicks as possible?

I will be posting more about visitor culture, and interesting ways on how to use Google Analytics soon.

-joel