something in the way

Images courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

As I was flying back home into San Francisco airport I was watching the city lights out the window and got struck by a bit of inspiration. I find cities beautiful, from the graffiti to the neon signs to the line of headlights on the highway. A city viewed from above at night is captivating. I wanted to try to recreate that same look, but by visualizing data (in one sense you can say that the real view of a city from above is already a visualization of population data).

I started searching for images of cities at night, and found these amazing images from NASA. All those images were taken from a space shuttle orbiting the earth. These images tell you a lot about the city, the layout, urban density, planning (or lack thereof). I wanted to take other meaningful data and create similar images.

All the visualizations below have been created with SpatialKey. However, this is some experimental work I’ve been playing with to generate the “night light” images, so it’s not released (and might not ever be). Basically this is a peak behind some of the R&D work I do for fun (yes, for a dataviz dork like me making fake “cities at night” images is my idea of fun).

Crime in San Francisco
This image is all crime in San Francisco for a 3-month period. You can see some of the same features that you can see in the NASA space image, such as Golgen Gate Park and the Presidio (the area on the north-west edge of the city). All in all it’s interesting how similar the crime image looks compared to the NASA image. Downtown is the brightest spot in both images, which means that it’s literally the brightest area of the city (the most streetlights), and also has the most crime.

And here are breakdowns for a few different crime types. Notice how different the distributions are. Narcotics crimes are heavily clustered and can be found downtown (in the Tenderloin), in the Mission (near the 16th St BART station), and along Haight Street near Golden Gate Park. Whereas vehicle theft is scattered fairly evenly throughout the city.

Narcotics

Theft

Vehicle Theft

Burglary

Graffiti Reports in San Francisco and New York
Both San Francisco and New York publish their 311 data, which is when citizens call for city services. One category of 311 calls is to report graffiti. Graffiti is interesting in that it often follows specific city streets. When we look at the graffiti data for both cities we see specific streets that have far more graffiti than others. I love these images (particularly the one of SF) because they really look like a view of street lights from a plane.

Trees planted in San Francisco
Another one of my favorites of this set is data for all the trees that the city of San Francisco has planted since 1990 (all this SF data is available at datasf.org). You can see the heavy planting along Market St (which cuts diagonally through downtown), as well as along streets like Sunset Blvd (the street running north/south on the western side of the city).

Street lights (or SF as a giant lite-brite)
One final image of San Francisco we have is the locations of every street light in the city. I liked this image because it reminded me of playing with a Lite-Brite when I was a kid. It almost makes city planning feel light a grown-up version of playing with little plastic lights.

The story
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, gives a very inspiring presentation on ‘The Science Of Happiness’. It shows what it takes to turn your company into an inspiring place with inspiring people.

Why this story inspired me
I’m a really big fan of the Zappos story. Doing business based on core values that you commit to and that everyone in the company lives and breathes. A company like this doesn’t need to search for employees, it attracts employees through their way of working. They deliver happiness. Who doesn’t want to be part of that?

What I hope sharing this story will lead to
I hope that more CEO’s will turn around their businesses into a happiness-driven organisation that all people (customers and employees) are passionate about.

Griffin Theatre Company is a new writing theatre in Sydney, Australia — that is, it focuses on producing newly written, original plays. A risky venture in a world where producers can put the Wizard of Oz on stage Monday and order their yacht on Tuesday. Approaching thirty years in business and looking to refurbish their facilities, the Company decided to rebrand, generate new interest in their brand and loosen the purse strings of donors in these troubled economic times. Turning thirty can be stressful, gone are your twenties, those promise filled days of limitless potential. Being 2009, it means all the 30-year-old brands for the next decade were designed in the 1980s, that terrible decade where good taste hid under a rock, cowering in fear.

This new identity doesn't cower in fear at all. In fact,Interbrand's Sydney office has challenged Griffin to visually strut their stuff, just as their challenging productions do inside the theatre. From Interbrand's case study:

As you wait for the opening lines in the pitch black of the theatre, you always know to expect the unexpected. And as each new story starts, you slip outside of your comfort zone. You stand on the edge of the cliff and hurl yourself into the deep end. Anticipation meets exhilaration, fear gives way to abandonment. Your senses adjust to an unknown world, and you enter an unfamiliar stage… The brand responds to these emotional highs and lows through the metaphor of "the deep end," and with an identity that allows Griffin to express its own creativity and personality through words.

The way design companies write case studies could fill an entire opinion piece of its own, so let's stay focused on the design.

The solution is wordplay, an approach that aligns perfectly with Griffin's focus on new writing. Lines of large, monospaced sans serif typography create a dramatic, dare I say epic, backdrop, much like a set in the theatre. By arranging horizontal type and turning "on" one letter per row, you spell out a word vertically. As we say in Australia, noice (nice).

It's an old trick yet appropriate and noicely executed. However I wonder if at any stage the question was asked, "Why not a cute little Griffin?" Obvious yes, but at times the typographic tricks of the identity system confuse or distract. Will the mark reproduce as well in small scale as a McDonalds' Arches or Nike's Swoosh? Definitely not, but one imagines the amount of material this brand produces to be of a much more manageable scale than a corporate behemoth. Also, from looking at the mark alone, it has an odd touch of the 80s' architectural practice to it, one imagines the venue is a rigorous rectilinear affair, rather than a historic stable at the bottom of the unfortunately named alley, Nimrod Street.

When considered in context of a small arts organization, with an even smaller budget for promoting itself, this concern becomes fairly substantial. Clearly the designers have opted for the "design an identity system, not a mark" philosophy. Overall, it does the job. The result has the necessary level of sophistication this sort of client deserves. Whilst it may not hit the lofty mark of the office's previous work for AWARD it's left this author in "anticipation, exhilaration, fear and abandonment" for Interbrand Sydney's third act.

© Emidio Cardeira

The story
You may find the brave voices captured in this short film haunting, shocking and humorous. In some of their faces you’ll see joy, anguish and grace as they trust you with their confession.

Why this story inspired me
It’s always such a great thing to see people share their stories in front of a camera. No matter how small the story. It made me realize that the best movie there is, is the one we all are in. No casting agency can beat this selection of ‘actors’.  ;-)

What I hope sharing this story will lead to
I hope that more people will have the guts to have a meaningful conversation with a stranger. I sometimes fail to try, but when I do try the outcome is sometimes surprising.

What is it? You’re shown a word “fargo” in a particular typeface, and given for options to choose from. The ‘test’ runs for around 30 such slides, and you’re judged according to how many you answer correctly along with the time you’ve taken. There’s three modes of difficulty, picking from a selection of over 600 fonts.

The thing that stands out in this app, is the beautiful typography and design layered on by Justin Stahl, a designer I had no idea even existed. Stahl’s design is gracious, unique, and exhibits the best of typography in any app on the iPhone. It generously uses italics where needed, and does away with the standard Helvetica in favour of Whitney by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. And it’s not just the static design; the animations also have the most gracious way of presenting new menus and fonts.

While the gameplay would have been boring [speculating here], the design lends to the experience making the whole experience a a treat in typography. I even discovered a few new fonts for my little collection! It’s an app of typography, for typographers, and most importantly, by typographers. At $0.99, it’s a steal.