Monday, January 14, 2008

more on NYT graphics

After a long holiday absence, it's time to start posting regularly again!



Continuing with the New York Times theme from my last post (almost a month ago!), I just caught this podcast at the User Interface Engineering website, called Making Data Engaging: A Talk with the New York Times Interactive Design Team. As the title suggests, it's an interview with Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes, who are part of the NYT's design team (Along with, among others, Matt Ericson, who's been mentioned here before) that develops the interactive graphics that appear on the NYT website.

Though there isn't a huge amount of content concerning visualization design explicitly, they talk a lot about the development of some recent projects, including the nice NYTimes Debate Analyzer. If you don't want to listen to the whole thing, there is some interesting commentary towards the end (starting at about 16:16) on their influences, which include 1940's magazine infographics, current advertising campaigns, and iTunes. Also, incidentally, I found the echange over their Trailer Living, Then and Now visualization (20:10) pretty interesting as an example of how what I would consider "vernacular visualization" (and they perhaps consider "cheesiness") can make for compelling designs.

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