Cogeco Dangles from the Cloud

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Alphachimp graphic recorder and cartoonist, Lloyd Dangle, produced this fun information graphic describing Cogeco Data Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Canadian company, Cogeco Cable Inc.

The larger image was produced to announce the expansion of their cloud computing services:

To meet the growing demand for managed information technology services and support for cloud computing initiatives, Cogeco Data Services (CDS) is increasing its data centre space across the Greater Toronto Area, Barrie, Oakville and Vancouver to more than 100,000 square feet – almost two football fields. The Company is also offering a suite of managed IT solutions to help organizations deal with their increasingly complex and demanding data needs.

They apparently liked it so much, it is now headlining the company's website!

FastCompany: Where the Jobs Will Be in 2018

Infographic of the Day

As part of a series looking at employment trends for the coming decade, NPR has created an interactive chart summarizing their findings.

Chad Hagen's Nonsensical Infographics: BYO Data

Minneapolis-based designer Chad Hagen takes our love of infographics and turns our little heart inside out. For these are no aesthetically-plotted data sets full of statistics. In fact, we see no handy information at all, just the colors and shapes that typically make an infographic chart pleasant to examine in the first place.

Comparing the Human and Chimpanzee Genomes

(via FlowingData)

As part of the Explore Evolution exhibit at the University of Nebraska State Museum, Judy Diamond displays a segment of the human genome in line with that of the chimpanzee that matches very closely. The point is to show how similar two are with the few differences represented by a drawing of a man, distinguished geneticist Svante Paabo.

See video of scintist Richard Dawkins explaining the exhibit.

GOOD Magazine’s Infographics Now Archived on Flickr

From Flowingdata.com:

You know all those infographics that you like so much fromGOOD Magazine? Well they're all in one place now in their Flickr archive. Head on over to view all 80.

Colorbrewer 2.0

© Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower and The Pennsylvania State University. www.axismaps.com

When building maps and information graphics, choosing the right colors to help designate variables--whether population, temperature, or campaign dollars--is a time-consuming challenge.

How does one choose colors that are effective in communicating data, that can be read by the colorblind, that can be considered print fiendly and/or "photocopy-able" ? 

The folks at Penn State have built Colorbrewer 2.0, an effective tool to swiftly aid in the process.

Once a palette is chosen, this free on-line tool allows for easy export to ArcGIS (a mapping app), Excel, or any Adobe product. You can also simply copy and paste the RGB, CMYK or HEX values.

Wordle Goes Mainstream

A century of most popular baby names - top 50 by decade

Yesterday's post commented on Fast Company's recognition of the importance of visualization skills. In their commentary, FC posted screenshots and video of word-images created with Wordle.

These Rorchschach-like wordmaps are fun, easy and effective to create with this (free) java-based web service. Many websites (including ours) now use the resulting images as navigation, sitemaps or splash screens. The Wordles give the viewer an instant impression of themes and importance ideas through font size and color.

I was blown away to see a Wordle used on the front page of USA Today as a feature article--not on the tool or on data visualization, but used as a graphic to illustrate the shifting trend in baby names!

Fast Company: Is Information Visualization the Next Frontier for Design?

The Tokyo firm Information Architects created this Web Trend Map which presents the most popular Internet sites in the intelligible graphic language of a subway system.

It is great to see that Fast Company is catching the visualization religion.

This post mentions the Obama speech Wordles, Tufte's screed against PowerPoint, and blogs that cover visual complexity (including the blog, Visual Complexity. 

Visualization may play a big role in wising up consumers. In the future, we're told, sensors will pick up tiny bits of info on every aspect of our lives and they will be played back to us as graphics. The smart grid, for example, will read the energy use in your home and send back understandable displays suggesting how you might save money by, say, waiting an hour to turn on your air conditioner or reducing your thermostat by two degrees. It will be up to architects to imbed this feature in the home in a way that allows us to interact more efficiently with our surroundings.

It's good to know, however, that Alphachimp Studio is on the frontier of design! 

Check out more Obama visualizations not mentioned by Fast Company (bastages) at The Center for Graphic Facilitation:

• Brandy Agerbeck
• Steph Crowley
• Diane Durand
• Other Visualization Tools