Our popular Walk or Bus chart is now an iPhone application. The app allows you to enter a travel distance as well as the time until the next bus, and the application will estimate whether you could travel faster by walking or by waiting for the bus. All estimates can be tweaked to match your walking speed, your city’s average block size, and bus speeds.
I have had several requests for the Color Sorting code I used to create these images. The pixel-based color sorting uses linear and Hilbert sorting techniques in RGB, YIQ, and HSV color spaces. ColorSorting is now on Github.
“Comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” These are my notes from Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics.
Choosing colors for maps, charts, and infographics can be a difficult task. Standard software packages like Excel and Matlab have tended to offer substandard color schemes (though this is getting better) so it’s up to the designer to learn about color and apply the appropriate techniques. This post will focus on understanding color schemes for maps.
A few quick notes regarding the latest release of Cartographer.js. Cartographer has an official Twitter channel. Follow @cartographerjs for updates. The latest version has full support for Internet Explorer (tested in IE 6+). The latest version also sports substantial speed improvements and should be easier to extend in the future.
Cartographer.js is a thematic mapping library for Google Maps that simplifies the development process and provides instant access to proven visualization techniques. Developers are freed from worrying about how to tweak the Google Maps API to build the thematic elements they need, and can focus on more important problems like data collection and normalization. Cartographer.js supports custom styling so it can integrate seamlessly into existing web applications.
It is intuitive that when you have a short distance to travel it is always faster to walk than wait around for a bus. But exactly how long should you wait? We decided to do some calculations to find out. Click here to see Walk or Bus?
The Ebstorf mappamundi was drawn in 13th century Saxony and depicts the Christian worldview within the body of a crucified Christ. The map illustrates both the “known world” as well as significant landmarks and points of interest for the curious pilgrim.
“Markets are People” is a beautifully drawn map. It uses area-distortion to show population at both the state and city level. This is the first map we have seen that uses the area-distortion method at two resolutions. The effect is visually accurate, highly readable, and offers deeper insight into the data than similar maps that offer only one level of detail.
We recently needed to sort the pixels in an image by their color. On first attempt, we sorted by simple RGB values: first sort on R, then on G, then B. But it turns out there are many other possibilities for sorting colors. Every permutation of the RGB letters could be considered (RBG, GBR, GRB, [...]