Now-Here-This has a great gallery of Alternative Tube Maps. One piece in the gallery is a radio-map! Yuri Suzuki’s fully functional radio on a printed circuit board that looks just like the tube map is truly inspiring. Since geodata and maps are becoming more and more open to public, we start to see their influence on arts better.
Sound Artist/Designer Yuri has a nice portfolio site with many other projects.
A different look on election results. Patchwork Map of the U.S. explains how and why Obama won based on categorized locations. I find this map very useful to understand how diversified different states are in the U.S. As a politician you can even develop your own strategies based on this map. It’s clear that one obvious reason to win was Obama has all industrial metropolises. Read more about it on WNYC.
Blending of colors is the new hot topic in election maps visualization. I totally agree with Dietmar that purple, which is the natural result of blending blue and red is a challenging color. He offers a solution based on CMYK and looks like picking a neutral color for 50:50 situation is a reasonable solution. Cyan and Magenta have a good contrast to be distinguished however on the other hand they do not represent the iconic colors of democrats and republicans.
How to achieve a good color blending method for visualizations is a great topic to think and practice. I will post my version soon.
On the Issue of Color in Election Maps
Every election brings us a sweep of beautiful new approaches to visualizing its results. This season, Chris Howard’s alpha-blending approach was my favorite - a subtle way of showing population density in relation to the outcome, especially in comparison to the heavy visual rhetoric of distortion cartograms.
It suffers, however, from an issue that I notice with almost all election maps: the official parties colors mix into a purple, undistinguisable mess, when mixed in the proportion of the outcome.
I would propose tweaking these colors just a bit so they become complementary and mix to grey, if the vote is 50:50. One way to do this is using a CMYK color scheme using 100% Y and 100% M for the Republican Party, and 100% C for the Democrats. I tried it out in the quick test below (imgur for full size):
“Islam, Republic, Neoliberalism” is the latest project from Burak Arikan, Istanbul based artist working with complex networks.
Project comprises of three network maps where mosques, republican monuments/ museums and shopping centers dispersed throughout Istanbul connect to each other within their areas of influence. These maps present a comparative display of network patterns that are formed through associations linking those architectural structures that represent the three dominant ideologies –Islam, Republic, Neoliberalism– in Turkey.
The image above shows the Network of Mosques connected through overlapping call to prayer sounds of 3000+ mosques in Istanbul. Project has been shown at Istanbul Design Biennial, 2012. Read more about the project on his blog.
notNeutral has a good collection of City Plates, 24 cities/plates in total. Maps become the new fashion for industrial design. Map plates or any other map-based objects always look nice and cool for decorative purposes but I wonder how It would be possible to create a better relationship between the socio/economic/political meaning of maps and the object itself. Maybe using different materials, shapes and sizes? This is a good question to think about.
Coin World Map contains approximately 3,000 coins and every continent is built out of its countries’ currencies.
This map made me to think what else we can use to represent country characteristics? Faces of people? Landscape colors? Languages? I believe it’s much nicer to see image/collage-maps rather than colored thematic world maps which represents GDP or any other economic indicator.
(via chartporn)
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