Beautiful Animated Wind Maps

The static image above doesn’t do these maps justice.  Go see the Wind Map on the Hint.fm site to truly appreciate the design work from artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US. 

The animation is mezmerizing, and the interactive piece allows you to click-to-zoom in closer to any part of the map to see much more detail in a specific region.  The main page shows the map based on the most current weather information, but the Gallery page has some snapshots linked to specific points in time (like Hurricane Sandy).  I love that even the speed legend on the side is animated!

You can also buy a poster version as an art print.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for sharing this on Google+!

The 2010 Year in Review #infographic

OnlineSchools.org has released the 2010 Year in Review zoomable infographic summarizing the major events of 2010.  The zoomable version is below, and it’s best viewed in full-screen million.

I have mixed feelings about this one.  Using the outer space metaphor, there are 15 major news categories with text descriptions of a handful of events in each.  Each event has a small celestial body illustration related to it, and a measure of blog posts and tweets on Twitter related to the event.

It really does need the zoomable feature, because the font sizes are dramatically different between the titles and the text.  That does make it difficult to read sometimes.  I noticed the Star Trek font used as well as part of the sections.

In the corners are some visualizations of things like Top Memes, Top Songs, Twitter Trends, Yahoo Searches and Google’s Fastest Rising Searches.

I think this one is missing good sources for where their information came from, a designer listing, some of the text s too small and in some cases is more illustration then infographic.  Overall it’s fun to zoom around and appreciate the details they’ve included.

Thanks Brittany!

2010 Year in Review by Online Schools | View Infographic Full Screen

Adobe Actionscript 3.0 Poster Viewer

Adobe has published posters like this one before for registered users of their different software packages.  Now you can download the ActionScript 3.0 Diagram Viewer, a zoomable version using Adobe AIR.  This can keep a stand-alone viewer on your desktop (or 2nd monitor) as a reference when you need it.  For some developers, this may be easier than viewing the high-resolution JPG.

With the excellent feature from Zoomify, and the nicely laid out AS 3.0 posters, you are able to zoom and navigate through the entire Flash and Adobe® AIR™ ActionScript 3.0 API.

The AIR app was designed by ShaneHoffa.

Thanks to Julz for the link!