The Berlin-based design studio Golden Section Graphics recently released their second edition of In Graphics. The magazine is published twice per year as a bilingual edition in English and German. The first issue won 10 national and international design prizes, including a bronze award from the ADC Germany and a gold European Design Award in the magazine category.

The cover story explores visually the events around 9/11. From 3D renderings of the plane crashes to a scatterplot comparing casualties of terrorist attacks to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another big feature shows everything you need to know about the Berlin Wall as its’ 50 anniversary comes up in August 2011. The rest of the 90 pages strong magazine is filled with beautifully crafted information graphics explaining the situation in Fukushima, Antarctica, Marathons, Woman Football, Royal Weddings and more. Contributions by illustrator Patrick They, artist Konstantin Voit, and designer and author David McCandless complement the original content by the Golden Section Graphics team.

The second edition of In Graphics is once again an extremely well put together piece of information design. Beside the quality of the works inside, it’s also a joy to feel the texture of the paper, the well crafted binding and the thickness of the magazine — Lovely!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tangible record of your social networking activities? Let’s say a collection of your most awkward photos, hilarious rants and embarrassing events that you could share many years from now with your grandchildren. Deutsche Post DHL helps you out with the Social Memories project.

The Facebook App enables you, after you granted it access to your beloved data, to create a book full of your social networking highlights. Beside photos and status updates, pages with infographics show trends, relations and priorities of your online behavior. In a style not unsimilar to the Personal Annual Reports by Nicholas Felton, these charts show key-figures of your social live and give a glimpse on patterns of your Facebook usage.

The book can be viewed online as a Flash application or you can let them send it over to you as a printed, 28 pages strong book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vkQGSOsZRc

Atipus, a Barcelona based graphic design studio was asked by Celler el Masroig to create the package design for their Vi Novell 2010. Atipus decided to put what’s inside the wine on the outside and created an infographic-like visual design for the label, the box and the coaster.

How does the communication within a creative team look like? Berlin based design studio onformative analyzed their Skype log files and summarized their findings in this poster. The visualization shows a total of 62,676 messages consisting of 2,531,434 characters sent between the two partners Julia Laub and Cedric Kiefer. All of the communication happened in the timeframe between 2008 and 2010.

The poster consists of one main visualization showing the complete timeline of sent messages and files. The balance of the communication, daytime or nighttime and the monthly average of typed characters are shown in more in-depht graphs. I haven’t had the chance yet to investigate further, but the image set on Flickr.com looks spot-on.

For an article about Sweden’s most famous statistician Hans Rosling in Google’s “Think Quarterly” Magazine, Moritz Stefaner has remixed two of the famous Gapminder bubble graphics. The project was commissioned by The Church of London, the creative minds behind the limited-edition book and the companion website.

About Think Quarterly

The publication is curated by Google UK and is aimed at Google’s partners and advertisers. Nonetheless, the well written content makes the first issue a good read for all folks interested in how data is re-shaping business.

In a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters. Our first issue is dedicated to Data – amongst a morass of information, how can you find the magic metrics that will help transform your business? We hope that you find inspiration, insights, and more, in Think Quarterly.

The visualizations

Fertility and life expectancy is a condensed, and static version of one of Gapminder’s famous animated “worm” graphics. Among others, it shows how Vietnam is today on the same level as the US in 1980 with respect to the fertility rate and life expectancy. Scaling the diameters of the circles according to the years, and then connecting them, induces a sense of motion over time, even in this static image.

Child mortality dramatically shows how Bangladesh manages to reduce its child mortality with a rate faster than Sweden ever did. In the background, the mortality rates of all countries are plotted in light grey lines, in order to provide a sense of the density and distribution of the data over the years. Note how measurements seem to fluctuate strongly before the 1950s.

While we compare the two versions, it’s important to keep in mind that the original visuals are embedded in the powerful interface of the GapMinder and thus may seem a bit more complex. I think Moritz explains the changes over time with his static versions in a clear and elegant way.

The Zurich International School astonishes with a high sense of responsibility, a censorious self-reflection and transparent communication. Their philosophy is that everyone involved with the school – students, faculty, staff and parents – are part of a huge learning community. Their values are condensed into a strong and ambitious mission statement. ZIS doesn’t simply frame these statements and put them on a wall, they constantly cultivate their mission and make sure they stick to it. In this Inside post you can learn how we supported them in this endeavor.

The Story

The ZIS is a non-profit day school for students aged 2 to 18. Besides the Early Childhood Center, the Lower, Middle and Upper School placed in the greater Zurich area, there also exists a facility in Baden. Currently, all campuses together offer an international education programme for about 1425 students from more than 55 countries. The school has a very innovative and technology-rich learning environment: they have 45 interactive whiteboards spread across all classrooms, wireless internet access, comprehensive e-learning tools, and every Middle and Upper School student receives a personal laptop computer.

To monitor the success of their mission – distilled in the claim “Learn, Care, Challenge, Lead” – and the resulting learning environment, the staff is regularly conducting surveys involving all parents, teachers and students. This valuable feedback is then evaluated and used as an initial position for creating a report. Our first assignment was to examine the graphical qualities of these already created and published reports and to propose possible improvements.

In contrast to previous reports, our team at Interactive Things suggested to focus more on the different mission sections and to create four separate parts rather than one long, continuous report document. Each of these sections would contain the most relevant information displayed using charts and text.

Besides the digital versions we created a series of posters, which can be printed and presented in the classrooms to make the report more easily accessible to the school community. We also combined the four sections on one single poster-sized paper and created a nice handout by folding it.

The Creation

After presenting these ideas to the responsible staff members, we were ready to go on with the concept. As the first step we tackled the collected data from the conducted surveys of the last two years. There were some questions only relevant for the teachers and some only for the students – questions concerning the use of technology, the practice of different media types or the handling of problems.

In the “Learn” section we focused on the diversity of resources which teachers regularly employ in their lessons. As already mentioned there are interactive whiteboards, so-called Smart boards, available in all classrooms. Blogs, Google Docs, online journals and school subscribed websites are used during classes for providing additional resources, as well as the online learning environments Moodle, ZMS and Classwork for providing custom online courses to a specific topic.

At ZIS students have to complete at least one service learning project each year in order to graduate. The projects are designed to extend learning beyond classrooms and to raise social awareness. For the “Care” section we centered these projects and additional trips.

In the “Challenge” section we wanted to show the shared responsibility at the school and how students deal with technical issues, whether they can resolve problems themselves, or if they have to get help from another student, teacher or a school’s IT specialist.

In the “Lead” section we agreed on addressing to the impact of the different educational technologies from a teacher’s point of view. Unlike all other data, we had a set of two years available for this topic.

Following the thematic definition for each section we figured out the appropriate visualization techniques for the corresponding data. Even if these drafts below are only intended to get a first impression and will be refined many times, we always paid attention to not add much more complexity to the visualizations than necessary at this early stage.

Designing for both screen and print is a challenge. You do not have the same possibilities in reducing the information density by adding filters and using event based functionalities. Instead you need to display all the relevant data and take full advantage of different weights and contrasts to lead the eye. Every color, font or line looks different on screen than on paper, thus you have to constantly print your artwork and check if the data is translated appropriately. On the other hand you do not need to care about cross browser compatibility and you are in full control of every ink drop’s position. You can even use interaction design – for example by folding or cutting paper, by utilizing the paper’s surface or reliefs. What we loved to do is working with different layers by overlaying text with colored objects:

The diverse final products – handout and posters – mean an additional effort. In terms of the different scale, you need to set and adjust the font and line weights for each piece individually. The posters and the unfolded handout both have a size of DIN A1, but on the handout a single section covers only a quarter, thus has the size of a A3. Therefore you don’t have the same space available and you are forced to rearrange or even to reduce the displayed information.

In contrast to posters which are one-sided, you can of course use both sides of a folded handout. This offers a great opportunity to lead the reader and introduce the report with a cover page. Then after unfolding once, the mission and philosophy of the Zurich International School is presented and finally the four detailed sections appear. For this additional side including cover page and mission summary, we came up with the idea to design a report theme. Suited to the internationality of the school, we arranged every country of origin of all attending students and all teachers.

The Final Products

Random Number is a curatorial platform that specializes in promoting emerging artists through curated exhibitions, commissions, collaborative opportunities, and the production of multimedia installations and other artworks. Now, Christina Vassallo, who founded Random Number in 2007, provides an opportunity for artists to expand their repertoire through artwork editioning processes with Random Number Multiples.

The experimental series debuts with two silk screened New York Times visualizations by Jer Thorp and two abstract compositions by Marius Watz. Both artists use custom software as their medium, and have created prints in which their hands are evident by applying digital processes to an analog printing technology. The prints are available in a limited edition of 50 pieces per design on Random Number.

I love how the generative design translates to the physical output. I definitely recommend to get your hands on one of these if you can. So, get ‘em while they last!

Peter Crnokrak from The Luxury of Protest has recently released a great visualization called Real Magick in Theory and Practise. It’s a poster of the 4₂₁ polytope — one of the most geometrically complex structures in mathematics.

Believed to be the most geometrically complex and aesthetically beautiful structure in mathematics, the 4₂₁ polytope is the algebraic form at the centre of a universal theory of everything. Originally described in the late 19th century, 4₂₁ models all interactions and transformations between known and postulated sub-atomic particles. The theory is an attempt to reconcile one of the fundamental unsolved problems in physics: unify quantum physics and gravitation in hopes of ultimately explaining the fabric of the universe.

The visualization was hand drawn in Illustrator to an accuracy of 1/10,000 of a millimeter. The poster is a minimalistic composition focused on the accurate representation of the 4₂₁ polytope and can be ordered on Peter’s website. The sophisticated print consists of silk screen print matte black on glass clear plastic with hand-applied 23 carat rouge gold foil and gold powder gilding.

New York based graphic design studio POP CHART LAB has two awesome posters for sale: The Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names and The Very Many Variety of Beers. Both designs are available as 18″ x 24″ prints and shirts will be available soon!

Anaptár 2010 is an experimental calendar for the year 2010 by Anna Farkas of Anagraphic.hu. The calendar is based on a radial system and incorporates sun and moon data in addition to the common days, weeks and months.

The overall aesthetic is reduced to the essence – the simple typography and the clear shapes work really well together. The minimalistic visual style makes it both easy to read and delightful to look at. Beside different shades of gray, certain areas are subtly color coded to highlight important dates. I must admit, that I am a big fan of this delicately designed piece of information visualization.