On any given day, could you say where the most photographs where being snapped around the world? It would be hard to say, except with this new visualization. Using data from around the web, including a healthy dose of imagery from flickr, Triposo has put together a world map that literally flickers with photographic activity. Different countries light up according to their most significant holidays, events and seasons. [Read more...]
It’s not often that a simple paper US wall map gets national attention. The omnipresent designs, with their colored state borders, cities and highways have been pinned or rolled on elementary school walls for the entire lives of those who inhabit the States today. Yet the map we bring you today has been garnering much praise for its well thought out design choices, winning the coveted “Best in Show” from the Cartography and Geographic Information Society and thus dethroning giant institutions like National Geographic, Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau who have won the award consistently in the past. [Read more...]
Intrepid German designer, David Hanaurer shows us a fascinating view of the world with his “WorldWide Carpets”. Using Google Earth and Google map images as patterns, Hanaurer has created modern versions of the Persian rug. [Read more...]
Now this is taking the idea of London’s famous ‘Tube‘ quite literally: Kyle Bean, designer, model maker and all around advertising re-thinker has created the London metro map using colored drinking straws. His map uses the colorful tubes in a playful, elementary school craft-time like fashion, which when finished appears completely to scale and quite grown up… that’s because he’s built the design over a large poster of the actual map. His final design, lacking the station labels needed to navigate the system, is still highly recognizable for what it is, a truly iconic design tribute. [Read more...]
With the world’s economies still badly slumping, many people are looking for answers to jump start their once vibrant nations, and more importantly, put some more money in their wallets. One way to keep nations working is to continue coming up with new, world changing ideas. This graphic details the world’s most innovative countries, not relying only on how many patent filings take place per nation – a common assumption of how innovative a country is – but also takes into consideration the success of those patents, their global reach and influence on the world. [Read more...]
The earth recently passed a huge milestone: an estimated 7 billion people now inhabit our home planet. That number is nothing to blink an eye at, yet most maps displaying the population of the world make little visual reverence to how astounding that mass of people really appears: enter a new map called Dencity. [Read more...]
As Chris McDowall rode the Auckland Public Transportation system in his home of New Zealand, he often imagined how all the busses, trains and ferries would appear carving their daily path from above. He would try to visualize the varied trajectories of each vehicle as they zig-zagged through the complex network… and it’s no surprise that he admits, “after a few moments I would get hopelessly overwhelmed and go back to reading my book.” Thankfully for McDowall and the rest of us, Auckland Transport published its Google Transit Feed data to MAXX, giving all the information needed to create an animated visualization of the network over a typical busy Monday. [Read more...]
It’s easy to lose track of where you’re traveling on a subway: the train leaves the station underground, the windows grow dark and soon you arrive at your destination… but how far did you travel? Even the maps of the worlds subways, with their easy to read simplified formats, mostly lack any sense of scale for the underground system. These simple maps by Neil Freeman at Fake Is The New Real, add that missing element, cluing us into how big an area these people moving networks cover. Try comparing the maps of San Francisco and Paris… the scale of the results is revealing and surprising. [Read more...]
We’ve all had plans to do something outdoors during a day when the weather prediction says 90% chance of rain… but when is that rain going to hit? Now, an in development app called Black Sky aims to answer that question, and look beautiful in the process [Read more...]
Ready to learn a new word? Anthropocene. Defined according to wikipedia it is “a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The term was coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.”
The images here where created by Felix Pharand-Deschenes depicting how various human influences, from road and rail, to internet cables and airlines create significant patterns covering the Earth. What can we learn from these patterns in how they are influencing the environment? [Read more...]
