Tatiana Plakhova is a Moscow based designer and the art director at Moscollective design studio. Her art is deeply inspired by complex patterns found in fractals or biological organisms. Instead of using algorithms to generate the images, she creates everything manually. This also indicates that, although a lot of her works look like visualizations, none of them are based on real data. Sublimotion found the right words to describe the viewer’s experience:

One instinctively feels that the complexity of her lines and dots does not lead to a dead end, but to an inner universe aligning with our consciousness. She combines the aesthetic experience of viewing art with that of observing nature. Her work embodies how balance and harmony can emerge from chaos; it plays with our natural curiosity to explore visual stimuli.

Editor’s note: With the Inspiration Impuls articles we exhibit mouth-watering visuals from disciplines like art, science or architecture to get your creative juices flowing. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!

Cell Size And Scale is a small Flash application that shows object of different sizes. Ranging from a coffeee bean to the carbon atom. The only interaction needed and the only interaction available is scaling. Seems obvious, right? What I really appreciate about it is the fact that the horizontal scroll bar is the only interactive object. No zooming by double-click, no drag & drop, no right-click. Simply move the bar from left to right as you scale through the dimensions.

Simplycity meets illustration meets education – hopefully the result is insight with a touch of joy.

Cell Size and Scale on Utah.edu

As Peter Gassner discussed in his article earlier this year such visualizations have a different goal in communicating data. Although it is not possible to understand the information at first sight, the visualizations help to communicate basic processes and basic concepts. The duty of extracting meaning from such an image as up to the experts familiar with the material.

The video is definitely a great inspiration and even there are things I haven’t completely wrapped my head around it helps communicate the work of Markam and his team in a much better understandable way.

The content of the book is displayed line by line and grouped into the chapters. The revisions are shown as an animation where the changed pieces of content are color-coded per version. Hovering over the lines opens a tooltip displaying the actual text of the book.

The visualization combines some best-practices of interactive information visualization. Animation gives an effortless overview over the revisions and draws the view in. Detials on demand give further context to an abstract representation of information.

This piece is a simpler version of a larger effort that looks at the changes between editions, and is intended as the first in a series looking at how the book evolved over time. The visualization is created using Processing and the data is provided by Dr. John van Wyhe, et al. who run The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Via Infosthetics / Ben Fry

The building blocks of the developement are Processing as the scripting language and Google Spreadsheets as the database. I’m currently also working with Google Spreadsheets so I was pleased to see that others share my thoughts about it’s advantages:

• Handles large datasets with ease
• The dataset is syncronized immediately, thus no need for keeping multiple files updated
• The dataset is editable simultaneously
• Provides the client with a familiar interface to edit the data
• No need for keeping multiple files updated
• Well documented API

I highly recommend to read the full article as it provides detailled information about accessing Spreadsheets using Processing. Jer also shares the source code as he already did for the NYTimes API or the Guardian Open Platform.

Project components

• The field this visualization takes place in is software developement visualization. The goal is to understand how software is built by showing code, commits, contributors, connections, calls, classes – the mighty “c” words gang, you see. During our studies at the IAD program, we’ve digged deep in this field and came up with a variety of possible solutions. You can find the documentation of my own project at artillery.ch.
• The analyzed data comes from GitHub, a superb code hosting platform that has rised to stardom in the community lately. For the visualization Ilya used the GitHub API to look up all the public repositories and to create a timeline of all the made commits to the repos.
• Let’s take a short look at code_swarm: The best description of code_swarm is ‘organic software visualization’.
  

  It eschews traditional data confinement in space and lets the elements play together in freeform and unpredictable ways.

The code_swarm code is open-source and available at Google Code and the official project website is at vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm sporting some videos of well known software projects (Apache, Eclipse, Python).