Hi guys! I am back again.
You are not going to believe what I have been doing these past couple of months! While I am in the process of summing up everything that happened in a blog post or two - take a look at the following paragraphs. Here are some cool tools for making our life more visual and visually beautiful :) Enjoy!
As it has already been mentioned in one of my really early web-notes, it's all about visualising big data now. Just think of how you browse news on the Internet or read scientific reports (I can only imagine a person sitting in a big cosy chair reading something on nuclear physics) or even your Facebook timeline. There are only a few things to catch your eye - screaming headlines, videos and pictures...mainly videos and pictures. Thus, in order to spread the message people and companies have to re-invent the wheel. Well...in a cool way. Like Vice News with their cartoonish stories Correspondent Confidential or, say, 'I am a Drop in the Ocean' project (well known yellow&blue poster symbolising ideas of freedom, democracy, mutual help and all-national support in a minimalist picture).
Of course, all great ideas soon become the over-used ideas, or move from 'Oh my gosh so-o-o amazingly original & fresh' phase to the 'we just had too much of it'. If you want an impression of 'infographics gone completely wrong' or 'how to ruin the idea of visualisation - I found this Guardian collection of 16 useless infographics. Moreover, I decided to share this great little guide from journalism.co.uk which looks into the psychology of visualisation and the extent to which colour, form and icons influence perception of the data.
Now that you are completely backed-up with all the basics, let me share with you something pretty:
You are not going to believe what I have been doing these past couple of months! While I am in the process of summing up everything that happened in a blog post or two - take a look at the following paragraphs. Here are some cool tools for making our life more visual and visually beautiful :) Enjoy!
As it has already been mentioned in one of my really early web-notes, it's all about visualising big data now. Just think of how you browse news on the Internet or read scientific reports (I can only imagine a person sitting in a big cosy chair reading something on nuclear physics) or even your Facebook timeline. There are only a few things to catch your eye - screaming headlines, videos and pictures...mainly videos and pictures. Thus, in order to spread the message people and companies have to re-invent the wheel. Well...in a cool way. Like Vice News with their cartoonish stories Correspondent Confidential or, say, 'I am a Drop in the Ocean' project (well known yellow&blue poster symbolising ideas of freedom, democracy, mutual help and all-national support in a minimalist picture).
Of course, all great ideas soon become the over-used ideas, or move from 'Oh my gosh so-o-o amazingly original & fresh' phase to the 'we just had too much of it'. If you want an impression of 'infographics gone completely wrong' or 'how to ruin the idea of visualisation - I found this Guardian collection of 16 useless infographics. Moreover, I decided to share this great little guide from journalism.co.uk which looks into the psychology of visualisation and the extent to which colour, form and icons influence perception of the data.
Now that you are completely backed-up with all the basics, let me share with you something pretty:
1. Easelly
What's that? I would call it great easy-to-use and free-to-download online tool for infographics. But the 'official' definition would be:
'easel.ly (n) - a theme based web-app for creating infographics and data visualizations'
So basically it differs from the other similar tools in terms of simplicity. Easelly offers a huuuge range, like really impressive one, of pretty and unusual themes even a child could adopt for creating a nice original infographics. Like, for instance, this free hipster theme on the left. Have you seen anything better? Hipsterlicious! In addition to the standard picture formats, you can also download. pdf version which is supposedly nice. I was going to embed this video presentation of the app, but the music in it was too annoying and I do not want to annoy my readers, so I am just going to paste this link here, so you can see for your self. However, what might actually be professionally useful is this video below which shows the way Eeaselly may be used by journalists.
Here you go:
2. Tiff
Speaking of hipsters:
'I got a tattoo of the word Helvetica on my chest in an Arial. It's ironic, you know'. If you don't get this joke from a PocketHipster app - the Tiff tool will be super useful. If you do get the humour, check how much an expert on fonts you are by taking this silly test here. This article from The Industry may also shed some light on the mystery behind the two alike looking fonts. Anyway, moving on to the tool:
'Tiff (n) - is a type diff tool that visually contrasts the differences between two fonts'.
The tool may help you to decide which font to use for your blog, or simply get more familiar with the styling differences. The only potential problem I see with this tool is that it only recognises Google Web fonts, but having tried many different combinations I did not see it as a big flaw. If you really do want to compare a wider selection of fonts or simply want to know more similar tools - check Typetester (may not be that hip, but super useful as it shows you text extracts in bold, italic and other styles and allows comparing 3 different fonts at the same time). To make it a list of 3, will also share with you this font-comparer with an original name Fontcomparer %-). It does not have a wow-design, but seems super convenient. So do not forget to check it out.
3. RAW
Ok. Now when I have tried this web-application, I want to go back to my statistics course and re-submit my lame Excel tables, pasted-in-a-Word-document graphs and other simple-looking data visualisations. RAW has been specifically designed for aesthete-sociologists, journalists and other specialists who work with data.
'Raw (n) - an open web app to create custom vector-based visualisations on top of the amazing D3.js library through a simple interface'.
Raw 1.0 - Basic Tutorial from DensityDesign on Vimeo.
Ok. Now when I have tried this web-application, I want to go back to my statistics course and re-submit my lame Excel tables, pasted-in-a-Word-document graphs and other simple-looking data visualisations. RAW has been specifically designed for aesthete-sociologists, journalists and other specialists who work with data.
'Raw (n) - an open web app to create custom vector-based visualisations on top of the amazing D3.js library through a simple interface'.
Beautiful graphs and charts can now be made in 5 easy steps:
copy-->paste-->customise-->export-->enjoy
Your work can be exported in vector format (.svg) or .png
And here is another video illustrating more useful features of the tool.
Raw 1.0 - Basic Tutorial from DensityDesign on Vimeo.
That's basically it. Thank you for reading :-)
