The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic

Kevin Quealy, a graphic editor at the New York Times, reveals the method to the radness of the interactive Netflix queue graphic that went up on the Times’ website last week. His discussion of their primary design considerations hits upon precisely what makes the map a popular success:

the hardest part about this graphic was designing the interface. We wanted readers to be able to find a given movie quickly, but a search box didn’t really work visually. We also wanted to give readers an idea which movies were most popular and which were most critically acclaimed.

I mocked up at least ten versions. None were any good. The challenge was navigation. As a user, I wanted to be able to see one movie in a bunch of different cities, fast, or I wanted to see a bunch of movies in one city just as fast. So there are two major navigation elements – cities and movies – but the map itself still needed to be the visual focal point of the graphic.

The ability to jump from city to city without worrying about the formalities of zooms in and out makes playing with it plenty pleasant. Not mentioned but nearly as important is the second sentence of the two sentence summary, just below the map title (the bolding is mine):

Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Some titles with distinct patterns are Mad Men, Obsessed and Last Chance Harvey.

A statement as intriguing as that is like a sheet of bubble wrap left in your path on the way to work: it’s not a clear invitation to play, but you’ll pop it anyway.

Eyecandy

Better than Barefoot

I’d never heard of Vivo Barefoot shoes until this Ask Metafilter question. If I had an extra $100 to throw around I might try a pair of these, though one of the answers gives me pause:

I had a pair of Vivo Barefoots (Barefeet?) which I loved. I didn’t find it difficult to walk in them at all. The main problem I had with them was that the upper didn’t seem to be fully waterproof (it’s hard to make a waterproof and breathable upper, as far as I can make out) and so because the sole didn’t raise your foot off the ground, walking in rain, in dewy grass, on damp ground, etc. all got my feet soaking wet. But this may have been tackled with the newer models - they also used to have a zip all the way around, which was the first thing to break, and now they don’t.

I don’t think I could ever wear a pair of the The Vibram Fiverfingers mentioned in many of the answers.

tomc's bookmarks tagged Flickr

LCC bomb damage maps: I have only one alert set up in Ebay, to be notified whenever anybody puts up for sale The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939-45. Just last year one copy sold for almost $300. The pictures linked here are free and right here on my computer screen. That’s even better than interlibrary loan.

Portishead: Magic Doors Audio DNA 3: A nifty, circular visualization created using Processing.

User Privacy Settings By Geography: A Flickr Study: I’m not sure how this data was collected but if the author’s claim is correct—that each of the map markers represents a sample of one million Flickr users—then it’s a revealing study of online privacy norms.

Darwin

This and others like it are for sale via Zazzle. The artist is donating profits to the National Center for Science Education.

The myth of the concentration oasis

The ‘modern technology is hurting our brain’ argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It’s based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted.

The trouble is, it’s plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case.

MapWatch

Like a worst dressed photo spread for British rail maps.

For a more theoretical critique of maps and mapping, you want to check out the field of Critical Cartography, particularly this introduction [PDF] by Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier.

Art from remote sensing

Data for decision

[via TomC]
The video’s about how they did GIS in the punchcard era.

Sensity by Stanza
[via anne]

This artwork visualizes the dynamic data around my environment as an audio visual artwork. I set up a wireless sensor network around my house in London. I live nearby a railway line, a factory, some trees and a mobile phone mast. (This is using real data).

The city is made up of bits of data that change. This artwork captures this change to try to understand the underlying fabric of city space. The artwork monitors the environment for change and relays these changes via the sensors.

Terminus, the god
[via blackbeltjones]

In Roman religion, Terminus was the god who protected boundary markers; his name was the Latin word for such a marker.

Ancient writers believed that the worship of Terminus had been introduced to Rome during the reign of the first king Romulus (traditionally 753–717 BC) or his successor Numa (717–673 BC). Modern scholars have variously seen it as the survival of an early animistic reverence for the power inherent in the boundary marker, or as the Roman development of proto-Indo-European belief in a god concerned with the division of property.

Incidentally, Terminus was the first name for the settlement now known as Atlanta.

Torque Control
[via jbushnell]
“This is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.”

Where should a thought bubble point?

Magic Paper
[via rodcorp]
“. . . because this is honestly the most exciting thing in the world.”

Thelonious Monk’s advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy (1960)
[via TomC]
My favorite line: “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play” (italics substituted for underlines). For some reason, everybody keeps lopping off play at the end of the sentence; but it’s right there in Monk’s handwriting, just below the last syllable of important.

If you’d like to swim upstream on this link: Swiss Miss got it from Eric Alba who got it from Neven Mrgan who doesn’t tell us where he found it.

It’s been floating around the web for a while, though. Do The Math did a little legwork on this and discovered that the original document is mentioned or used in Steve Lacy’s introduction to Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music.

Comics grammar and tradition
[via TomC]
A style guide for comics letterers. I’m intrigued by all the traditions—”[a balloon] tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head”—and recent trends:

Thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years in preference for narrative captions. Text in a thought balloon can be italicized. The tail on a thought balloon is made up of smaller bubbles and should point towards a character’s head (not mouth, as in a standard balloon tails). Generally you should have at least three little bubbles of decreasing size that reach toward the character. Two seems insufficient and more than four or five seems excessive.

GOP.gov Anywhere API
[via migurski]
Innovative. Slick. Beige.

Kansas rethinks its prison policies
[via bfunk]
Among other initiatives, there’s been a major push to soften the traditional, cop-like approach used by parole officers when dealing with parolees.

The new strategy seems to be working: five years ago around 203 parolees returned to Kansas prisons each month but by 2007, the number reduced by 100 per month and the number of new crimes—felony convictions that people pick up while they are on parole supervision—also nearly halved.

With apologies to James Niehues

Principles of cartography
[via TomC]
Pretty much a one-stop shop for links to useful information on mapping. The outline format might turn off some visitors—the page seems to have been made to support lectures in a mapping class at Rutgers—but there’s plenty of good stuff here.

Case in point: this map of the Breckenridge Ski Resort [PDF!] has adopted the Tube map’s use of colored lines and circles instead of relying on decades of ski resort mapping tradition. Unlike these old, bird’s-eye views of airbrushed slopes, the new Breckenridge map gives skiers and snowboarders what they need when they’re actually on the mountain itself: relative positions for all the lifts and trails.

I expect network maps like this one will continue to show up in unexpected places as map users become more comfortable with the style. Take Mondrian: after the world warmed to his brand of minimalism, they put it on tubes of styling gel.

Richard Serra sculptures on Google Maps
[via blackbeltjones]
Richard Serra’s massive sheet metal sculptures are easily seen from the Google planes. Are there any artists consciously collaborating with our new abilities to drag and click from on high?

Cake Wrecks: when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong
[via jbushnell]
A collection of funny cake mistakes from Cake Wrecks.