Tuesday, February 12th, 2008...8:58 pm - Catherine Gleeson
a beautiful collision > code + visualisation - the new breed of designers
Interesting to see a number of “design” companies relying heavily (but poetically and thoughtfully), on code to generate visualisation work these days. I know it’s nothing new, but I am genuinely excited by the possibilities inherent when really good information design, generates really good visual design generated by really good code. People are probably familiar with the work of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar via “We Feel Fine” (check it out if you haven’t already). We Feel Fine was built using Processing, a Java-based language. I keep stumbling across a whole raft of recent design school graduates who are genuine hybrid designer/programmers - for whom the intersection of maths and art is almost incidental.
In addition I came across the latest visualisation tool in Digg created by Stamen Design in collaboration with Digg Labs. Digg Pics dynamically displays images as people vote for them - thus capturing a snapshot of Digg community activity from moment to moment in real time. Stamen and Digg Labs are also responsible for Swarm, Stack, Big Spy and Arc. BigSpy is another personal favourite largely because its creators respect the value of typography, form and colour and thus design. It’s a nice example of good code meeting good design. Stories appear at the top of the page as they are Dugg - the more Diggs a story has, the larger it appears. “Form follows function” as one of our favourite thinkers once said - or perhaps “Form Follows Data“?
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