Quake Family Tree

From Wikipedia, the Quake Family Tree shows the history of the Quake computer game engine and all of the other games that were built from each version using a mind map.

Found on digg.com

Treemaps for drive space

I don't think I've posted much about specific software programs, but there are a number of infographic programs that anyone can use. These two are programs that analyze what's on your hard drive, and show it you in a treemap display.

The one above is Disk Inventory X for the Mac (which I use), and the one below is WinDirStat for Windows. Both are free, and are real-life examples of how you can use infographics in your life. So take a minute, and clean off some of that old junk taking up space on your hard drive.

On The Map

Found on notcot.com, On The Map is a cool project by Stefanie Posavec that maps the rhythm and flow of literary works into some stunning visual posters. Breaking a story down into chapters, paragraphs, sentences and finally individual words. Then color coded to capture the topics as they reappear throughout the story. The level of detail is really impressive. Click the images to see the high-resolution images from notcot.com.

Thanks Jonathon and Jason for sending the link.

Stefanie also created a number of additional visualizations of the same story.

A Brief Guide About Bridesmaids

Cool infographic video about (you guessed it) bridesmaids. Created by Yaniv Fridman, Nicolas Alexander and Amber MacKay for Motion Design Class at Vancouver Film School. Here's a link to the High Quality version of the video.

Their blog discusses the creative process and the tools they used to create the video.

Found on infosthetics.com

Who Owns the Organic Food Companies?

Great chart by Phil Howard from Good Magazine showing which of the large food processing companies own some of the most popular organic food brands. Pepsi owns Naked Juice?

Found on digg.com after I heard about it on the diggnation podcast.

Star Wars Toy Collection

Josh Budich has created the website My Star Wars Collection to share his personal collection of over 600 Star Wars figures. He has created a pixel image of each figure in his collection. Moving you mouse over the image brings up the name of the character, and clicking brings up a photo of the figure still in its packaging. The are a number of ways to narrow down the assortment by figure series, movie the character appeared in or year the figure was released.

Thanks Torquil for sending this one in.

Visualizing Pi (π)

Cool little GIF animation to visualize the value of Pi (π) from Wikipedia. Click the image to view the animation.

Found on digg.com

Dark Matter distorts light

From NASA.gov, an image depicting how Dark Matter (in red) distorts light from distant galaxies as it travels across the universe.

Explanation: Is the distant universe really what it appears to be? Astronomers hope not. Intervening dark matter, which is normally invisible, might show its presence by distorting images originating in the distance universe, much the way an old window distorts images originating on the other side.

17 Ways to Visualize Twitter

Also from FlowingData.com, this post about the many ways to visualize the Twitter universe is really cool. Twitter has really been gaining some momentum lately, but I keep looking for better ways to follow the posts.

21 Ways to Visualize Your Email Inbox

FlowingData.com has an entry on the 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox, which has some really cool visualizations.

Found on SimpleComplexity.net, thanks guys. I hadn't come across FlowingData.com before.