icono-wha?

SynthPond

SynthPond is a sort of audio exploration toy app for iPhone by Zach Gage. It really brings to mind a very complex and highly customizable windchime. I’m not quite sure how else to describe it without getting into a more technical explanation, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Even without understanding everything that’s going on, it is still highly entertaining and beautiful to watch.

There’s a very detailed writeup of it on the CreativeApplications blog with additional screenshots, video, and in depth details about what SynthPond can do. While you’re at that site I recommend taking a look around. There’s lots of other great iPhone apps reviewed there and other non-iPhone-related geeky creative coolness.

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Create Visualizations of Your Last.fm History with LastGraph

LastGraph generates a visualization of your music history information from Last.fm - free. I’m a sucker for pretty data, so of course I generated a visualization for myself (pdf). Unfortunately, by linking my poster I’m disclosing my secret affinity for Jingle Cats. Don’t judge me!

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One Designer’s Reflection on Unused Work

Last year, for his presentation at the HOW Conference Armin Vit took a look at sample of 100 of his old logo designs, either ignored or discarded after other designs had been selected by clients, and attempted to extrapolate meaning. What really attracts me to this article is the visual presentation of the statistics culled from his analysis. 30% of the designs are abstract, 42% use typography, 58% use a graphic icon or illustration. Fascinating. It never dawned on me to examine my creative work in this way.

Beyond gratuitous visualizations, he also takes some time to reflect on how the designs are now somehow lost on lonely storage media. This aspect of the design process is something I have pondered numerous times. In the past I used to fill sketchbooks up with ideas and drawings, but that was years ago. Now much of work, well let’s be honest, all of my work is digital and rarely sees the light of day again after a project is over. Thumbing through old sketchbooks is immensely more gratifying than scrolling through cold files on a CD. All the time spent creating each piece of work, now lost.

Armin’s presentation was such a creative reason to pull it out again and give it all another chance at meaning.

Image courtesy of chethan shankar on Flickr

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Human Brain Cloud

Aside from having the coolest name, Human Brain Cloud is an insidiously addictive word association game that gratifies the information-lover in all of us by displaying results as an interactive word map. I guarantee that if you try it you won’t be able to stop…

The game, the visualization, and interesting stats.

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Walk2Web - Internet Degrees of Separation

Walk2Web is an incredibly addictive (though not time efficient) web-based surfing tool that allows you visually browse the internet using links that connect one website to the next. As if that wasn't engaging enough, it is also possible to create a user account that can contribute to the rating, tagging, and commenting on any site you happen upon. There are also icons to send pages to digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Hatena.

*Note that there is a text reader that is enabled by default on the system that will read page titles aloud when you click on a link. If your speakers are cranked it is quite a surprise.

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Comparisons Using the Universcale

The Universcale, a comparative visualization of the size of objects in our universe, strikes me initially as a combination of concepts similar to the old Eames Powers of 10 movie and the Starship Comparison chart. The interface uses flash to easily move through nano to light-year scale.

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Twingly

Twingly is a screensaver that serves as a visualization of the global traffic in the blogosphere… and very addictive to watch. Normally, I run the open source Electric Sheep screen saver, which is very pretty, but I’m switching over on my main machine to run Twingly. (More at Primelabs)

Note:  does require that you run a current version of .NET, so setup may be a process depending on how up to date you keep your system. [via]

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Just What IS iospace Doing?

This is a question I have been mulling in my head for a few weeks now - somewhat passively…and certainly not so much that I would call and interrogate them. Iospace are the clever geniuses behind the ever-growing Etsy.com, a site for independent crafties and artists to display and sell their wares to the rest of us.

The evil genius in Etsy.com isn’t only that they offer access to such a diverse community of talented creators - it is how they have managed to tackle issues of organization, UI, and search for many thousands of pieces of user-generated content. Search on this site is definitely about the journey more than the destination - with visualizations that not only let you discover items by tag, but by color, time, artist location, and artist/item metric. If fact, it is hard to STOP searching at times because the experience is so intriguing.

The shining star of this site is their Treasury, a “member-curated featured items” collection of temporal lists. The Etsy community shares among itself in the Treasury - but there is something even more amazing - you can actually see other Etsy members browsing the lists in real time. OMG - you can chat with others browsing the same list as you and leave comments as well. Most amazing, from a designers pov is that it is possible to actually observe how people are browsing the area.

There is more information and screenshots available on using Treasury on the Etsy Treasury Demo blog, but why go through all that - just check out the site. This is how browsing/shopping SHOULD be.

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HTML Graph

HTML graph, graphs the structure of websites. Written by Sala using Processing. View a live map of this site or make one of your own (requires Java). [via coudal]

There are more cool projects on the Processing site.

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