Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Sketches


In my morning readings, I've stumbled across a couple of visualization sketches from Grid/Plane in collaboration Instrum3nt for Google.
No big news there, except for a keen sense of design. I specially love the Map (title) and the columns (below). The map not only shows data beautifully, it also matches the data with a label on the bottom. I imagine panning, zooming, clicking, searching and intricate tooltips are a given in this sketch and if not, I'd like to think it wouldn't take long before they notice the need for it for better understanding the information and further gatherings.


As for these wonderful columns, I can almost see them moving and the animated tooltip formed labels dancing around. I do notice the lack of axis (and therefore the information you'd expect from them such as data type, name, origin and unit), but think about the selection opportunities if those boxes in each columns actually map a more detail level of information. By double clicking them, they could fall apart, forming new columns for the more detailed level while a zooming effect shows the user a close up the the selected data (Many Eyes' Block Chart example - play with the combo to get the idea).
These are only drawing, sketches, ideas... They don't actually map Google searches, but imagine when they do! For me, this will bring the word "googling" a whole new meaning.
By the way, when was the last time that a neologism widely accepted globally had it's meaning changed or even got a new meaning to it? this comes to prove once again that creativity is keen to success!

Delicious Del.iciou.us

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