The makings of an successful project — and a well equipped set makeup artist.

dalasverdugo:

(via vincentpeone)

Flowing data presents an excellent visualization of Wal-mart’s meteoric rise to becoming the supermarket giant that it is today.

There’s a noticeable gap in the western penetration, but I have a sneaking suspicion that that has more to do with distribution and logistics than it does with politics or policy.

http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/

[ thanks Daniel for the link ]

The person (woman, Brooklyn, Japan, who knows?) behind this site consistently blows me away with (her?) intensely detailed art projects, from chain mail dresses to pumpkin pies baked into pastry pumpkins in thirty easy steps.

What I like best is (her?) step-by-step instructions on how she creates these beautiful little projects. I think developers can learn from this sort of openness.

So we’ve been thinking a lot about typography on the Web and in print. We’ll be interested in seeing how this plays out over the course of the next year, since it’s more difficult and time-consuming to attend to leading and kerning on the Web than it is on the page. I see the written page as a place where the chaos-fearing control freak can obsess over the smallest detail (characters per line, lines per page, and so on), and the Web as a place where chaos reigns. Will the twain converge?

-Thomas

Once again, the mind-readers at Googleplex have read my thoughts and stolen my ideas.  I just talked about how cool this feature would be with the other Switchyardians last week.

If you use the Internet the same way I do (as a personal storage locker for memories and menial record-keeping), you’ll be pleased to learn that Google has just announced that it’s location-aware web/mobile app, Latitude now includes a feature called “Location History”.  This feature allows a user running Latitude to query its system for any point in time and recall where he or she was on this great big planet of ours.

Obviously, there’s potential for disaster here if some poor unsuspecting user gets their history compromised. Personally, I’ll be waiting for the first time a defendant submits their Google Latitude account as a corroborating alibi.

—sam

Just purchased the book, version 3.2, on the recommendation of Randall Hansen (Lead UX Designer at OpenSourcery). Considered “the typographers’ Bible.”

Recommended this book by a friend last night. A little late to the party, perhaps, but nevertheless happy to continue building evidence that good design is more than just pretty pictures. Proof.

ICANN opening Web addresses to non-Latin alphabet.

Continuing our fascination with neuroscience’s collision with everything from economics to sociology to, yes, the novel.

The visual display of data in this app tells a more complete story of US job titles over time than could pure data alone. Look at the increase in specialization, and also the severe decrease in “Farmers.” Or, check out “bartender” and look at the story that data tells.