May
25,
2011
We've just completed a mapping/data visualization project for One.org, the watchdog group that tracks the G8 and EU's spending commitments to Africa. The site represents each member country as a flag-filled circle, sized according to the relative size of that country's contribution. We track and display four variables for each country: percentage of total income, total dollar amount, amount to sub-Saharan Africa, and per-capita amounts. It's been interesting to spend time exploring the different aspects of this: from a amount given per-capita perspective Norway blows everyone else out of the water, but from a total dollars point of view they're actually quite small. The Norwegians, it appears, are generous, but poor. The urls change too as you interact with the piece, so if you want, say, to link to dollar amounts in 2005 you're all good.
Two things about the project:
- It was pretty strange working on a site where the client's name is "One." Eventually it got too weird to say "you've got a call with One at three" or "One just wants one more thing" so eventually we started calling the project "Garth" since that's who we were talking with most of the time.
- This was the first time we've worked with the excellent design team at Mule Design and I can't say enough good about them or recommend them strongly enough; what a lovely and professional bunch of people. Thanks Mule!
Continue reading "One.org data report is live"
May
6,
2011
Sometimes I wish I could be as disciplined as my friends at Berg, who've been faithfully writing up weeknotes rain or shine for 308 weeks now. These days it's a struggle to even participate in all the things that are going on around the studio, much less write about it. In my head sometimes we're still just a couple guys sitting in a room smoking cigarettes and staying up until five in the morning [really]. The reality is that we've been up at around the ten-person mark for a couple of years now, almost half of us are women, I quit smoking 2 years ago, and these days I'm much more likely to see 5 in the morning by waking up that early than by staying up that late! In any event it's Friday afternoon and I didn't want to let another week go by without talking about at least some of the work that's been going on, so:
We're doing a pile of thinking about the background tiles that are the foundation of most of the maps that people are working with on line today. There's a ton of room to play here. For a little context, one of the earliest experiments with embedding information into these background images we did was with a model of San Francisco provided to us by SOM a while back. The first render was a fairly conventional one, a grayscale view with shadows and so forth:
In the second render, you take the block and lot number of each building, and use those to generate different colors for the buildings:
When you overlay the first (image) on top of the second (data), you can do this kind of thing:
Selectively blurring and unblurring complex shapes on the fly, in the browser. And since you know the logic you used to generate the background color from the block and lot number, you can extrapolate back out from the color to the lot number, and provide links to the City Assessor's records for those buildings, without having to send all that data down the wire. Which is kind of cool. We've used this in a couple of client projects over the years, and are currently working on a mapping project that's going to rely on this kind of thing in a pretty big way.
I mention all of this by way of segue into the problem that starts to come up when you start wanting to do this for the whole world. It takes about 360 billion tiles to cover the whole world down to zoom level 20. Which is alot, especially considering that most of them are in the ocean.
So here are some lovely things that Aaron's been working on, in part to find a way to more easily limit the areas that the tiles have to get drawn for:
Each continent gets a set number of discontinuous shapes that it's allowed to be made up of, and depending on the number of those that are allowed (the second image allows alot more than the first), you can start to generate coastlines that designate areas where you probably don't need to render tiles at very zoomed in levels. Plus, as is usual with Aaron's stuff, it's fun to look at.
Continue reading "Goings on"
Oct
27,
2009
Well, it's been a few years since I've needed to kick a coconut into all the corners of a new space (to absorb any potential bad juju, naturally) before moving in, but: here we go again!
The capable and strapping men at Bay City Movers have just spent about 9 hours on Tuesday loading all our stuff into a truck and moving it about 250 feet down the street to our new digs, at 2017 Mission St., Suite 300, in San Francisco. We can literally see the old studio out the windows of the new studio, and vise versa—so in geographical terms it's not such a big move, but the difference in the quality of the space is like night and day, the difference between this (and you shoulda seen it way back when):
and this:
It's a lot bigger than our old space, so we've spent the last couple of days rattling around the hallways and things are a bit chaotic, and in the case of the plant room/solarium, wonderfully so:
And the sunsets in the corner meeting room sure are lovely:
(all photos by Sha Hwang (who still owes me his bio), except the top one)
In some ways it's a shame to move now—Google just literally put Stamen on the map in their latest design update:
Sadly, it's at our old location. If only there were some way that people could update our location on a map...
Continue reading "Movin' On Up"
Apr
24,
2008
Well, the Web 2.0 Expo is here in San Francisco this week, extending its delightfully O'Reillyesque tentacles into every nook and cranny of town—including a takeover of South Park—epicenter of the first round of Internet hilarity back in the late '90s. The town is full of nerds and marketing types alike, City Hall is all lit up, and you can't go near SOMA without tripping over all the discarded conference badges.
Stamen's part in these shenanigans was played by partner Mike Migurski, who, along with Twitter engineer Alex Payne, presented Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen. Mike's got a post up about the talk, Matt McAlister has provided a nice writeup, as has Eric Nguyen at Mindtangle.
Aside from the tickle I get at seeing "Twitter and Stamen" on the marquee, the thing about this that makes me happy is that there seems to be a growing openness to the idea that it's the way things fit together that matters online—that it's all well and good to have an excellent site, but if people can't quickly and easily access the data on their own terms, you'll only be able to involve them so far. And I love that people are responding well to the idea that the simple Excel spreadsheets that Crimespotting makes available are just as important and useful for making data about cities available as the more complex APIs that projects like Cabspotting or Diggmake available.
Alex and Mike put their presentation up on Slideshare; you can get a sense of what they talked about below.
Continue reading "Mike at Web 2.0 with Twitter's Alex Payne"
