Showing posts with label Visual Display of Information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Visual Display of Information. Show all posts
Movie Maps
I can't stand how great these are. Andrew DeGraff's visualizations of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies:
Le Temps Retrouvé
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| Autograph manuscript of Proust's Le Temps Retrouvé with attached sheets of revisions |
Atlas of Remote Islands
The Atlas of Remote Places is one of the most beautiful books I've seen in a long time. If I had the money I'd buy everyone I know a copy. Judith Schalansky both wrote and designed this small tome after weeks of what I assume was a rabbit-hole's worth of research in Berlin's state library. The fine design and printing of the book would have been enough to make me want it but it's her essays, magical, probably true* vignettes or histories of each island that make the book a marvel. It is no wonder it won the 2009 prize for Most Beautiful Book in Germany.
* The author:
That’s why the question whether these stories are "true" is misleading. Every detail stems from factual sources…however I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books, and I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.The librarian in me took a deep pleasure in sliding this book next to my copy of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a book I've been bringing with me everywhere since I got it in fourth grade. Without getting preachy, I really look forward to a future where the only books that continue to be printed are works of beauty for intimate perusal like this one.
And just because I love it so I'm tacking on Lewis Carroll's map of the ocean from The Hunting of the Snark:
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”
Strange Maps
I am the 10,000,000th person to come across the blog Strange Maps but I don't care. It is the most consistently fantastic thing I've seen online in a long, long time. It has motivated me to drag from the vaults a collection of maps I've been meaning to post on here forever. While researching a conceptual encyclopedia I made for my college senior thesis I found a wonderful old book deep in the library stacks called Unrolling the Map: The Story of Exploration by Leonard Outhwaite (1935) that I think beautifully illustrates the discovery of the world from an unashamedly Eurocentric point of view. For some reason you weren't allowed to check it out so I had to sneak a scanner into the library and covertly gather these images, coughing heavily to hide the noise. I've tried to pair them with maps detailing the same period in world history as close as I could using the book Atlas of World History by John Haywood (1997):
1800 AD — Exploration
1812 AD — Cultures
1550 AD — Exploration
1530 AD — Cultures
1490 AD — Exploration
1492 AD — Cultures
700–1300 AD — Exploration
1279 AD — Cultures
1000 AD — Exploration
1000 AD — Cultures
800 AD — Exploration
800 AD — Cultures
3000 BC — Exploration
2000 BC — Cultures
I like to imagine how mind blowing it would be to live in Europe 2000 years ago and be handed an accurate map of the world and all the people in it, or to be transported from Medieval Europe to the advanced Aztec or Mayan capitols, or Japan, or to Polynesia. It would be akin to being handed a map of the night sky with all the inhabited planets pointed out on it. Kind of like this:
Catalog of Monsters
In 2005 I went to the Little Boy exhibition at the Japan Society which featured images from the book An Anatomical Guide to Monsters (1967) that I desperately scoured the internet for but couldn't find. Thankfully someone finally posted some more images from either it or a book doing exactly the same thing and has allowed me to tag this post with all my favorite labels: 
On a related note, these are also cool: 
The 2007 Feltron Annual Report
I've seen this done lots of times before but never this well. This designer has beautifully cataloged his every action over the course of a year and turned it into a beautifully designed booklet. Looking through it I wished I could have a similar report summarizing my life without having to record my every beverage, conversation, purchase, meal, and turn around the corner.
You can see the whole thing here or order one of the few remaining copies here. He's also done them for 2005 & 2006.
Rap Charts
This website explains rap songs using graphs and charts:
Oh, and for the uninformed each one links to its respective video!
Oh, and for the uninformed each one links to its respective video!
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