There are some great infographics here. There’s a video on gestalten.tv about their book project, Data Flow, and some documentation available here, in German. All good stuff.

I was having a look through Behance’s Typography Served website and found this. It looks like it’s in Jihad Lahham’s portfolio (well, I think it does) but on his site there’s a post with pics and nothing else about it. Need info!

Antonio Carusone mailed me to announce his new project, The Grid System, a site (obviously enough) about grid systems. Now, I don’t normally post about things from mailouts or press releases, but since I’m particularly partial to a good grid and I’ve already found a couple of useful things on this site that I’ve found interesting and even bookmarked, I reckon I’d end up writing about this anyway. So, go and have a look.

What did I bookmark though? Well, Syncotype for one. It’s a bookmarklet, i.e. a bit of javascript you can bookmark and then run on any page you’re viewing, that overlays a baseline grid on your page. I have an 18px baseline grid on this site, which often ends up being broken by images I post not having a multiple of that as their height. It’s certainly something I could solve with a bit of extra javascript of my own (or even something server side) to ensure the height of a containing element of an image is indeed a multiple of 18px or a round number of ems, but I’ve not got around to it yet.

The 18px baseline grid. If you have default text settings in your browser, and use Syncotype with an 18px grid, this should all line up. Should.

Also, there’s the problem of whether such automatic measures are even appropriate. For a while I cropped and trimmed all images to a set of heights to match the baseline, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit the image and I found adding extra padding to the container (a paragraph tag in this case) actually spoiled the vertical rhythm of the page. I decided that as this site is a single column that it would be the apparent vertical rhythm that was important, rather than the real one. I wonder how other people solve the problem? Or even if they do…

Funny how coincidences arise. I found both Mario Feese’s Air Lines and Chris Harrison’s Internet Maps at about the same time and was struck by how recognisable the continents are, and, as I’m fond of maps I thought I’d compare the two images. On the Air Lines map, most of the continents are rendered as a ghostly but fairly accurate outlines, with South America rendered as a beautiful abstraction, right to its tip. The Internet Map is obviously somewhat different, with almost all the connections between cities in rich countries; Africa barely exists and the tip of South America is shown with a single faint line, whereas North America and Europe are smothered in a riot of lines. I overlaid the two maps onto each other and I noticed an interesting thing about the Internet Map, which I describe below.

So, to align the maps I needed to use various groups of cities that appeared in both maps; using the southern hemisphere to get the horizontal scale right - there are sharp points for cities in South America, southern Africa and Australia, and in the northern hemisphere I used San Francisco, LA and Tokyo to get the vertical scale. Thankfully, both maps are using the same projection.

Everything pretty much lines up nicely, except there’s that node in the Gulf of Guinea which I originally thought might be some satellite uplink affair at Sao Tomé, maybe a huge data haven I’d never heard about. However, after lining up a map of Africa with both maps it turns out to be nowhere near any land at all. In fact, when I was trying to mark the point on Google Maps, I realise this big data interchange point (the biggest in Africa!) is at 0.0°N, 0.0°W, which is a suspiciously default sounding location. Maybe in the data that Chris Harrison used there are a few unknowns, with their locations set to null, and these connections should be shown elsewhere? If they were removed, Africa would be even more ghostly.

Found this on the CR Blog: “Do you speak Pompey?” - a map of Portsmouth with the streets relabelled with examples of apparently local slang. I wouldn’t say very much of this slang is unique to Portsmouth - I hear much of the same phrases and accents in Brighton, and around Sussex and Surrey too - but the map is pretty interesting nonetheless. As CR Blog points out, it’s similar in execution to the NB Studio map of London. It’d be interesting to do a map of a larger region (or country!) showing accents in a similar fashion. It’d be of aesthetic interest more than scientific, but I’d be tempted to buy one.

This pair of videos by the Brazilian Press Association is pretty interesting to watch. I’ve had the link bookmarked for a while as I like the animation style. In Portuguese and English, the animation demonstrates how the placement of a single comma can alter or reverse the meaning of a sentence, and makes the point that no one should be allowed to make any changes to what’s written in the press, no matter how ‘small’ the edit:

With the animation style for this piece being rather good, I can’t help but think that while there’s a lot of ‘typographic animation’ around, most of it is pretty samey and unoriginal, repeating over and over the idea of attaching each new word to the previous one, rotating the viewpoint, zooming in or out and then attaching the next word. The style can work wonderfully, but a lot of animations leave a lot to be desired - using typefaces that simply don’t work at such a range of scales and angles, are badly kerned, use too tight or too loose leading, and sometimes look just plain rushed. Sometimes they come so close to a great result, but a lack of polish (and checking for typos) limits the effect.

The style demands a great deal of attention to detail, which is why the really good ones are so impressive. The Pulp Fiction one is, to me, the acme of this style - being made up almost entirely of text, but I think that the animation on The Project for the New American Century deserves a lot of credit for using it with more traditional 2D and 3D animation to convey a powerful and provocative message.

Fazai38 posted a couple of articles showing some examples of inspirational posters. I’ve a few favourites but at the same time (and coincidentally) Computerlove posted about Negro Nouveau’s new typefaces with a graphic that was happily similar to the Deerhoof poster. I rather enjoy the similarity of the basic motif, and the different effect each of the two implementations give.

I like the little bubbling flask motif on the “We Are Scientists” one, and of course I’m going to like the one that resembles guilloches.