I meant to publish this a long time ago, but time slipped by me. Better late than never.

In my senior year I gave a presentation to the IDSA in which I had to summarize my work in 7 minutes. I opted to speak over a video, rather than a powerpoint, since it would force me to stick to my time-limit.

It’s been too long since this presentation, and I forget my speech, so you’ll just have to imagine what it was I was babbling while this played.

The central theme was the power of using computation and data in design to create things previously impossible.

This past weekend I had the pleasure to speak at ONA09 in a panel (#ONAux) with Aron Pilhofer and Elliott Malkin of the NYT and Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. I spoke briefly about the new challenges of designing online, the importance of capturing attention, and specifically how animation and interaction can help draw viewers in to interactive graphics.

I’m happy to make public the slides I used for my talk at /else/ona09.

I made reference to The Dot and The Line, and some of my work at the NYT:

• A Map of Olympic Medals
• Winners in a Long Presidential Campaign
• A Collection of Olympic Torches

Playing with some maps this evening. It’s pretty interesting to see San Francisco by only its altitude contours.

I get to do a lot of interesting work with the Facebook Data Team. This past week has been quite a lot of fun as I’ve gotten to combine my two loves of social data and story telling by generating a series of graphics for a story about Facebook in the New York Times in the Business section of last Sunday’s paper as well as served up online. Graphics were generated using Processing.

I couldn’t be more happy and excited about the result of this year’s Malofiej Awards. The Malofiej Awards are the international Grammies of the infographics world.

I’m most excited about receiving a Peter Sullivan Award, or best in show, for the Ebb and Flow in the Box Office published in Feb 2008. I worked on this graphic with Amanda Cox, who did very well overall at Malofiej.

In addition to this, Map of Olympic Medals, a graphic I put a lot of time into, received a Silver Medal in the “Features” category.

These graphics, as well as the other award recipients, will be published in a book in the near future — I recommend keeping an eye out for it!

This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Since there have been a number of questions throughout the monkeysphere, we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis.

Read more about our findings (and become a fan) at the Facebook Data Page
and my coworker Cameron’s blog at Overstated.net.

The size of each country’s circle represents how many medals they were awarded for that particular year. Scroll back through each summer games to see how countries fared over time. Click the “by ranking” tab to sort the countries into a list.

The graphic was created using a force-directed graph using a particle system. Countries try to locate themselves near where they are geographically located as well as close to geographically neighboring countries. The circles do not overlap. Flash is a bit too slow to be interactive, so there is a pre-render on our side to determine how each year’s layout will appear.

A visualization of all new polls for the presidential race shows poll’s margin of error and statistically significant leads. This graphic uses a special image-baking technique to be iPhone friendly!