Category: Visualization]
Last week I bumped into this blog called Information Is Beautiful. The owner of the blog, David McCandless, showcases visualized data (both his own and other's work) in unique and fascinating ways. This site is totally my cup of tea. I quickly added it to my RSS program.
Visualizing data was one of the reasons I focused in college on Graphics and UI programming. One of my first UI projects was working in X Windows/Motif on a Physics program that dealt with stresses on beams. The user could put a variable amount of horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or rotational forces on a beam and the program would show a 2D view of where the stresses would be. Black would be low stress. Red would be the highest stress with various shades of the rainbow in between. For my first graphical UI program it was really neat. It made me realize two important things:
- How important color is to representing data.
- How a good visualization could allow the user to intuitively figure out how the program worked.
Nowadays most of the UIs that I do are a lot more simplistic. Tabs, tables, buttons, and check boxes are usually the extent of my designs. But every once in a while I get a nice little tidbit of UI to create that reminds me of my first program.