Can design save the newspaper? (Jacek Utko)

Short TED Talk by Jacek Utko that explores how design can not only improve newspapers, but also your product or brand.

Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? It just might.

Bad News for Newspapers

Infographic from the NY Times (I know, ironic isn't it?) that shows the drop in circulation of major newspapers across the U.S.

Heavy debt has dragged several newspaper companies into bankruptcy. The industry’s dwindling revenues have forced some money-losing papers to close, and papers that are for sale are having trouble finding buyers. Experts say that before long, a major American city could be left without a daily paper. (Related Article)

Found on Twitter from @edial

TimeSpace - World

From The Washington Post, TimeSpace-World is an experiment in a visual way to see news stories from around the world.  You can specify the time period during a day that you want to see with the slider, and then click the stories to zoom into the map.  You can also enter search terms to view a smaller set of relevant stories.

TimeSpace is an interactive map that allows you to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. Discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered. Use the timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, and customize your news searches to a particular day or specific hour. (Many Washington Post stories appear at midnight; others are published throughout the day as news happens). Click the ? In the upper right for help.

 Link found from Mitul69 on Twitter

Google Data Visualization Concepts

Check out GridPlane.com.  JD Hooge has posted images of some data visualization concepts he worked on with Google to look at aggregating social media topics.

I collaborated with Instrument to develop a series of data visualization concepts for Google. These interface sketches are are all based around a concept of aggregating and visualizing online media buzz across various social media outlets.

Thanks Edial for sending in the link!

Mapped Up - Visual News ScreenSaver

From lifehacker.com, MappedUp is a visual RSS Reader/ScreenSaver that displays the location of news stories on a pixel map of the world.  MappedUp is a free download for Windows and Mac OS X.

Savings Mis-Trust video

Our friends over at XPLANE have done a fabulous video explaining what led up to the recent credit crisis in the U.S. economy.  A great job simplifying a complex problem.

Thanks Parker, and great job to your team!

Watercube, The Book

Watercube, is a new book by Ethel Baraona Pohl.  The book is about the National Aquatics Centre built in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, and has some cool infographics inside.  Some of the graphics were contributed by architect César Reyes Nájera.  A review of the book can be found here on www.v2com.biz

WATERCUBE: The Book is a complete monographic publication about the National Swimming Center for the Beijing Olympics 2008. With an exhaustive description about the Watercube we present a detailed study of the project. The book makes an holistic approach to the project that starts with a brief description of urban and social changes that China has been experienced in the last decade. These facts have encouraged the construction boom that made possible these kind of projects occur in cities like Beijing.

 

This page compared the amount of steel used to built the Watercube to some of the most well known buildings around the world.

This page shows a comparison to the same set of buildings around the world, but shows the tons of CO2 produced due to the steel used in their construction.

This page is one of the years of the timeline leading up to the construction of the Watercube.

Here you can buy Watercube, by Ethel Baraona Pohl, on Amazon.com.

Special thanks to Ethel for sharing the images from her book, and allowing me to post them on Cool Infographics!

Democratic Party Voting Margins

New interactive infographic by Shan Carter and Amanda Cox on nytimes.com that shows the voter margins between Democratic candidates Hilary Clinton and Barrak Obama. These are based on exit poll data.

Choose any of the sorting criteria on the bottom, and then you can see specific data about any particular state by hovering the mouse over the blocks. The top chart shows how Men voted overall, and the second chart is how voters with No College Education voted.

Thanks Les for sending in the link!

The world as you've never seen it before

Check out WorldMapper! Above is a map of the world based on true Land Mass, but with WorldMapper, you can adjust the size of the countries based on whatever data you are trying to convey.

This is the world map based on Total Population:

This is the world map based on Total Computer Exports:

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the US news media is actually showing less. She uses WorldMapper to communicate her point about the state of today's news in the US.

In the Shadow of Foreclosures

Great graphic from NYTimes.com showing the subprime mortgage foreclosures as a percentage of all subprime mortgages by geographic region of the country.