Click the image to link to the full map.

Geographically positioned stations. Looks cool, does the job ‘above ground’, but is it as easy to follow below ground? The suggestion of time, distance and bearing are what make the current, in-use tube map so clever.

Phew

http://heylookspencer.tumblr.com

I didn’t think it would be such a big deal, but it is. Two things:

1. The contrast is amazing. Not really noticeable until you try out a 3GS or previous model, but the difference is that the blacks appear to be on the same plane as the black face of the phone itself, which may be a part of the second point:

2. The user experience is improved somehow: the screen seems somehow closer to your finger. Maybe Apple used thinner glass, but whatever it is they did, in a lot of light situations the screen image appears to almost sit on the glass as opposed to under it. Sometimes when I’m using it, I notice this optical illusion and I feel a little bit like I’m in the future, minus the robotic unicorns.

Found this site the other day: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/
It has a lot of great gifs made from movies. Also has RSS so you can get good gifs a couple times a week!

My father got a job at Ogilvy & Mather London and my brother and I went to a local Church of England school. My mother, having never been a stay-at-home mom (she used to work at my father’s business), took up the opportunity to be a dinner lady at our school: she’d make sure the kids did “more eating and less talking” and would help set up the gymnasium with all the tables before lunch, usher the children in class by class, then help with the cleaning afterwards. The dinner ladies had their own table in the gymnasium where they’d eat their lunch. One lady commented to my mother (and the rest of the table) that she found the way my mother cut her meat, put the knife down, picked up her fork in her right hand and then ate the pieces was vulgar. I soon found myself figuring out how to eat peas with a fork upside-down in my left hand and a knife in my right.

Bath is a beautiful city and from the perspective of New Jerseyans, the architecture is something never-before seen and quite breathtaking. We were celebrities, in a way, as the new Americans in town, or at least the only ones at the school. My peers would ask questions about the beaches, Disneyland, Miami and California. This was the time when LA Gear shoes were popular, huge t-shirts with ‘CocaCola’ and ’7up’ logos were the fashion, and Bart Simpson was the coolest kid in the world. I’d tell them what I knew, which wasn’t much, as I didn’t recall spending time in either of those states, let alone Disneyland and we didn’t have satellite television so we’d never seen The Simpsons.

As the years went by, the questions thinned and my new teachers went from asking where in America I was from, to “I detect an accent, are you Canadian?”, to not noticing I was American at all. I was pretty much Anglicised. It had been fun being the American kid in the class, but as kids grew older they picked up on the kind of generalizations that prompted me to write this in the first place:

“Americans are fat”

“Stupid yanks”

I had no idea where these ideas came from. I was an American, and I’ve always been quite skinny, and clever for that matter. I had a disconnection with America-proper, to an extent, and an even greater disconnect with what television and newspapers had to say about my country. The only reaction I had at that point was to be embarrassed and to try to be as British as possible on the outside. It felt pretty natural and was easy to do, except sometimes a rush of national pride would hit me. I remember playing at a friend’s house in 1993 during Bill Clinton’s inauguration. My friend’s father asked me, as an American, if I thought he’d be a good president. I had no idea at 11 years old, but said yes. In hindsight I find it odd that my parents didn’t insist on me watching the inauguration in the first place, but now I am the only member of my family in the USA. My father and brother are UK nationals and my mother, who I’d argue is the ‘most American’ of us all says ‘Bath’ and ‘France’ with a soft A.

I haven’t mentioned that there was another American family in our circle at that time. They arrived from Texas about a year after we got there. They switched schools a few times: starting at the one we were at then moved elsewhere but eventually we all ended up at the same secondary school. Our parents stuck together from early on, though, so often we’d spend entire weekends at one-another’s homes when the others’ parents needed space. I remember there being a lot of divorce back then. It was really exciting having them around. One was my age, another my brother’s age (2 years +) and another two years older than that. They had experience being real Americans. They had baseball cards, baseball gloves, Nike Air Jordan shoes, football jerseys and military haircuts. If I stuck with them, maybe I could be American again, and I was for a while.

Our last names were close enough alphabetically that we always had seats close together in classes and prep (prep = doing your homework at school until 8pm). There was another American kid from Atlanta in our class. We really had a posse going, but eventually high school took its toll and I ended up in a different social circle. People got bullied and then the bullied oddly bullied back later on, but through all of it I was still allowed to borrow my classmate’s rollerblades whenever I wanted. 13 year-old politics are pretty weird.

In the mid-to-late 90s, the older two of the three other Americans, and the kid from Atlanta all moved back to the USA for various reasons and I subconsciously resumed being British through the end of secondary school and my gap year until two things happened: the first election I was eligible to vote in (against George W Bush) and September 11th, 2001. The first was a short lived affair – nothing more exciting than filling in some forms, mailing them to the USA and knowing I was doing the right thing. The second was nothing short of confusing as I had anger for both what had happened and also the way the president I didn’t vote in was handling it.

A few years later when I was studying in London there were huge anti-war marches. George W Bush’s second election was under way. I was close friends with a Norwegian-American. His father was in the US Navy so he had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and some other places in the USA. He went to high school in Norway but had a more-American accent than I did. We spent hours in pubs talking about Bush – all the while trying to be careful not to be overheard by American tourists (our college was very close to the British Museum) as we didn’t want to engage in conversation with ‘the wrong side’, not on our turf.

A strong visual memory I have from this time is walking up Kingsway in Holborn, London in the middle of the street. The road was completely empty on my side of the central barrier, as tens of thousands of people were walking in the opposite direction on the other side of the road, taking part in an organized anti-war march. It was an odd feeling: I was on their side but I was nervous to join these recurring marches. What if they found out I was American? What would they say to me? Would I be responsible for all of this? This visual image of a single American walking, alone, on the other side of the street might seem dramatic. The reality of it is that I had to get to college up the street to print something and that was the quickest route.

At that time, and for the years up until President Obama started his campaign, stereotyping, generalization and cheap-shots were at an all-time high. I recall reacting to a complaint of the use of ‘Americanisation’ on a neighborhood internet forum. It was something about language and I intelligently responded calmly noting that language is always in a state of change and English is a perfect example of it (Latin – German – French influence). “You’re practically English anyway, so what do you care?” was the response. I cared because Americans were being blamed on the ‘dumbing down’ (or more correctly, ‘change’) of the English language, when they were no more to blame than mobile telephone manufacturers and the education system.

Then just yesterday, I read a post on Twitter that read “Frankly, if they burn a Qur’an, I will wage a personal war on them. And I’m not even Muslim. Americans need educating. Obama, do something!”. I was outraged and went on the defense: “just remember ‘they’ are not ‘all Americans’ and not all Americans need educating” and “it’s generalizing like that, that got those Americans to behave how they are behaving”.

This blog post is, in a way, an apology for perhaps over-reacting to a less-than-140-character message. But I’ve disguised it as an explanation for my defensive (or possibly passive aggressive) attitude: the back-and-forth between American and British I’ve gone through, and why it was inevitable I’d relocate to the USA and marry an American.

I love my country (but I probably love my new state more) and now I’m not in the UK I suppose I feel I can react more openly and honestly to such generic criticism without the fear of “if you don’t like it, you can always go back to America” as an answer. Because I do like it. The UK is a great union of countries full of great tradition, art, beer, cheese and people. But to generalize: I can’t believe I managed to stay in a country full of people who hate people from my country for 22 years.

I just started using that flipboard app for iPad yesterday and added ‘Good’ to my contents page. Good.is is all about good stuff: “10 Best Foods for Your Looks”, “Is Summer Vacation the Enemy?”, “Videos from London’s Cycle Super Highways” are just a few tweeted headlines from today – and, as you can expect from something a mid-to-late-twenties, semi-trendy, creative professional who just moved into Pacific Heights, San Francisco would subscribe to, it’s packed full of those oh-so-hot infographics, which I assume is short for information graphics.

The confusion I have about said infographics is that (when I was a boy) information graphics were intended to make information easier to understand, or to put information in context (in a way that makes it easier to understand), as opposed to making information simply look nicer on a page.

They’re mostly quite nice to look at, but here are two of them I’d like to re-label from ‘inforgraphic’ to, well, something else:

Good.is - General Motors sales in USA vs. China

I’d call this one an illustration instead of an infographic. For starters, the title “More GM Cars Sold in China Than America” is a very, very (VERY) clear  piece of information that doesn’t really need clearing up by a visual communication specialist, not to mention the illustration is a little confusing in itself: the cars aren’t aligned on a grid  so it’s actually a little tricky to quickly take in just how many cars are American and how many are Chinese. Each visualized integer (USA:China 1.08:1.20)s take up the same amount of space (visually) and I found myself having to count, to an extent, to see how many cars where on each line.

How would I solve this infographic? Either, I’d arrange the cars on a grid so that there are clearly less American cars, or, I’d use a pie chart breaking down the number of cars sold in China, USA and ‘other’ markets, or even a simple bar chart of the two markets compared… Or I’d just not illustrate the information at all.

To sum it up, I don’t think this piece of information really needs anything visual to make it clearer so maybe a stock image of a GM car would be just fine for the article as that would be less likely to confuse at all.

The other one is this:

Good.is - A Dropout Epidemic

This is a much more complex set of information than the previous, and there has been some visual elaboration made to make it more interesting than a regular chart spit out of Excel or Numbers. However, this visual embellishment does nothing to clarify the information and is therefore just embellishment. The page is just as daunting as any chart spit out of your favorite spreadsheet software despite the cute pencils and script typefaces, really, look at all of that information! So, I’d class this one as a chart, not a piece of information graphics.

How would I do this one? No idea – I  probably wouldn’t publish it as it doesn’t add a whole lot of detail to the story given there are no hard figures related to each cute pencil bar. Maybe it would have made sense to include a high state and a low state as an illustration to accompany the article, then give a link to a very straight, not illustrative, chart with all of the data figures if that’s what some readers would want to see.

To sum up my opinion on this infographic, I don’t think the design of this chart really does much to make the information it conveys more digestible for the reader.

To conclude, I think…

During the Obama campaign, infographics really took off – charting became ‘hip’, and for a while there was some great information graphics work flying around. That wasn’t the birth of visually interesting – as well as functional – information graphics. Just check out the book ‘A Smile in the Mind‘ and look at the financial reports section – you’ll see some amazing work in there dating back to who-knows-when (my copy is currently in a shipping container so I can’t tell you) and I recall The Guardian started publishing great information graphics after their rebrand/reformat in the early-to-mid 2000′s.

I believe (but am open to suggestion) that infographics are a trend and the term ‘infographic’ doesn’t seem to match up with what I understand to be ‘Information Graphics’ (I almost applied for a degree at LCC specifically in Information Graphics before I was accepted at Central Saint Martins, so that goes to show how much thought can go into ‘infographics’: years of training). They became part of popular culture in the late 2000′s and are still floating around as visual filler to accompany press based on data – whether or not they improve the reader’s understanding of the data.

I personally can’t suggest an alternative. Without these pretty charts and information-inspired illustrations, we’d probably be looking at stock photos or political cartoons – neither of which I have any qualms with.

It’s all much of a muchness, but that’s blogging for you.

If you have some information you’d like visually communicated, get in touch.

The answer is pretty simple – broadcasters have a limit to the volume at which they can broadcast and they save this loudest of loudness for the loudest parts of the show. An explosion sound effect wouldn’t have as much impact if all the actors talking were just as loud, right? Using audio dynamics to create impact is part of the art of television.

Taking this into consideration, advertisers compress the audio in their ads so that every split second of audio is as close to that maximum as possible. The music only gets quieter to make room for a loud, booming voice.

It’s classic “make the logo bigger” behavior, and almost every ad is trying to out-shout the others which (in my opinion) is dumb because they’re all subject to an upper limit, thus all shouting just as loud as each other.

So, advertisers, why not surprise us with some quiet ads right out of a show? I’d pay more attention to an ad that stopped me half way through the act of reaching for the remote and turning down the volume than one that just kept on shouting at me.

Just spare us a whispering child voiceover, please.