Category: Information Design
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TV News is Vaudeville
On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage. Surprisingly, there was a part of me that…
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Bring Your Camera to your Polling Place
On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism. I can’t even begin to…
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The Best Voting Technology
It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even…
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Design = Interior Design
Here’s some news for web designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, information designers, user experience designers, and whatever else you might think of yourself as: New York Magazine defines “design” as “interior design”. And of course the fashion world uses the word “design” to mean “fashion design”. I’d guess that if you asked a hundred people…
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Elegance through Nomenclature
New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but…
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Where Writers Can Learn from Programmers
I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English. But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically…
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Reaching Higher Ground with Google Maps
The ever-excellent Google Maps mashup Google Pedometer has recently added an “elevation” feature, allowing you not only to see how far you walked, ran, cycled, or drove, but also to see how far up and down you went along the way. You simply click the “elevation” link and it displays a scrolling iframe with your…