Not sure how I found the link but i discovered this intersting little timeline map of modernism. Colourful, capturing your atttention thorugh key with a soft white and grey column background to help seperate each individual year from 1910 - 1950.
Mapping Modernism charts 10 of the influencial designers for the period where you can scroll horizontally to see where these designers were at a point in time & click on the time bars to find out more like a concept map (scroll down for description). You can also see a designer's biography by clicking on their name. Some of the ones I know of being:
Serge Chermayeff
Theo Van Doesburg - De Stijl
E. McKnight Kauffer - his tessalating birds illustration for the underground ads.
& Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Simliar to my type timeline map.
The exhibition Modernism: Designing a brave New World - 1914 - 1939 was 'the first exhibition to explore the concept of Modernism in depth, rather than restricting itself, as previous exhibitions have, to particular geographical centres or to individual decades. Many forms of art and design are represented in the show. But as befits a period when the debates surrounding how people should live took centre stage, the exhibition focuses on architecture and design. The range of objects – including architectural, interior, furniture, product, graphic and fashion design as well as painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, collage – reflects the period's emphasis on the unity of the arts and the key role of the fine arts in shaping contemporary visual culture'.
Some of these objects include the Club Chair by Marcel Breuer from the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius's leadership. But also the more graphic genius of Hary Beck's Underground Map that has spawned so many more stylised variations in 1933.
Great Mapping.
Found here: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism/mapping_modernism.html
Mapping Modernism
Type Timeline Map 2
Type Timeline half2
Originally uploaded by visual think map
It was inspired from Stefan Thermerson 'Kurt Schwitters on a time Chart' featured in the brilliant Typographica NS no. 14, December, 1966 edited by Herbert Spencer (Typographica by Rick Poynor 2001).
UK Brands 2007 Visualisation
Top 10 UK Brands 2007 Visualisation
Originally uploaded by visual think map
http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/01/top_ten_most_po.htmle
I liked the vector curved lines like with Maeda's Key magazine covrer post. kept to a soft blue, red pastel palette so you can really visualise the brands and their order, arrangment, ownership.
Was inspired by a car badges brands visual:
coolinfographics.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-owns-car-compan...
featured here: visualthinkmap.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=2168552%3APho...
Visual Choreography Notes
These pages from his book Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham are fantastic visual thinking explorations of dance space. These wonderful pages of red topographic movement and complimentary weaving lines of type notes are great explorations of the notebook spread themselves.
They are very similar in style to the spreads from Kurt Schwitters & Theo Van Doesburg in 1920 - 30's De Stijl or even Dada from Picabia. Very abstract compositions with varying line qualities and shapes.
Merce Cunningham is one of the most influential and innovative choreographers of the twentieth century. His works, such as Summerspace (1958), are in the repertoire of internationally celebrated companies, including the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opéra, Zurich Ballet, and Rambert Dance Company, among others. Along with John Cage, Cunningham collaborated with other contemporaries, including Jaspar Johns, Andy Warhol, David Tudor, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg.
Cunningham is not interested in narrative and character development; his choreography investigates the formal elements of dance. Cunningham and Cage shared the belief that movement and music are equal. Accordingly, they created the choreography and music separately in their collaborations.
Merce Cunningham Info Source: http://www.artsalive.ca/en/dan/meet/bios/artistDetail.asp?artistID=165
Image Source: Cunningham, Merce and Frances Starr, ed. Changes: Notes on Choreography. New York: Something Else Press, 1968 featured in Creative Reviews - March 08 - p42.
Type Timeline Map
type timeline half1
Originally uploaded by visual think map
This visual map explores the relationships/characteristics of the many different typographers/fonts, artistic movements from 1890 - 1950 charting each decade. Wanted it to be minimal style but vast in content, yet still clear and easy to follow.
It was inspired from Stefan Thermerson 'Kurt Schwitters on a time Chart' featured in the brilliant Typographica NS no. 14, December, 1966 edited by Herbert Spencer (Typographica by Rick Poynor 2001).
'...in which the practices and the techniques of typography have changed dramatically, in which technical developments have released typography from the restrictions and disciplines imposed by metal type, and allowed it to become increasingly visual and less linear, less linguistic. the frontiers between graphic design, photography, and typography have dissolved; the marriage of word and image has been consumated'
said by spencer, poynor pg 127.
Great summary of today and visualisations that we see, said in 1967, 41 years ago.
Visualising San Francisc-jello
These are brilliant ways of visualizing, mapping allowing us to see & percieve these regular topographic landmarks abstract luminous colours & organic shapes in a different light.
Liz Hickok's project for her Masters in Fine Art, they are part sculpture, part photography and video, it resonates beyond the immediate appeal of the rainbow colors to become a sublime form of landscape. Her version of the city, which stems from a long-standing interest in three-dimensional city maps, emits a different kind of luminosity than the late 19th century Hudson River Valley variety. This in particular Palace of Fine - C-PrintArts, 2006 12"x16" 36"x48"editions of 12 has a great opposite harmony of orange & blue when light is refracted through gelatin.
'I make the landscapes by constructing scale models of the architectural elements which I use to make molds. I then cast the buildings in Jell-O. Similar to making a movie set, I add backdrops, which I often paint, and elements such as mountains or trees, and then I dramatically light the scenes from the back or underneath. The Jell-O sculptures quickly decay, leaving the photographs and video as the remains' liz hickok.
The molds she construct herself are based on idealized postcard images and her own photographs – have a way of making her vision go down smoothly. When she makes her city shake, as in her short video work, the landscape comes alive with the power of nature and culture on the brink of transformation, through changing our perspectives of the world in quite an innovative way.
http://www.lizhickok.com/10palace.html#photo
http://www.mills.edu/academics/grants_and_special_programs/mfa_exhibitions/mfa_2005/hickock/
Originally Dugg by user Gregd here
http://digg.com/search?section=all&s=san+francisco+jello
Web Trend Map 2008 Beta
Not all visual maps are prescribed to geographic content. Moving away from the past 3 maps of geography but continuing the theme of technology, there is this wonderful map from the Information Architects mapping popular internet websites.
In its second version they've 'taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. By popular demand, we enlarged the poster size from A3 to A0' (greber, 2008, web-trend-map-2008-beta).
In the popular style of train/underground maps, first started by Harry Beck’s London Underground map, which he developed from 1931 onwards, they are being subverted into alternative content, like here of websites map. Their clear, clean white space [1] is highly effective for organisation of information.
It is a type of
concept map
that is similar to brainstorms where it connects ideas and to that of mind maps. They are ‘graphical representation[s] where nodes (points or vertices) represent concepts (defined by [Joseph .D] Novak[2] as perceived regularities in objects and events), and links (arcs or lines) represent the relationships between concepts’. These objects and events are the common features which we abstract from our experience. The events form Wordsworth’s childhood memories that are ‘“sources of adult confidence and creativity”’ and helped him when writing Daffodils, or the visual memories in Barcelona of Picasso that inspired the painting of ‘Les Demoiselles of D’avignon’ and the objects could be the Iberian sculpture, or the Monet painting that also inspired him (Coffey, Hoffman, Cañas, & Ford, 2002, p. 2), (Sharples, 1999, p. 48).‘Concept maps are used to form knowledge models by placing them in a hierarchical organization and appending elaborating media onto the nodes within each map’ (Montello, 2002, p.2). An excellent example of this is the search engine KartOO. The elaborate media stated are the hyperlinks, animations that are activated when you click on one of the nodes (website names).
Overall it is an excellant map utilising white space & framing knowledge beautifully, brilliant balance of form/function. More articles will come featuring projects mapping the internet.
Online Clickable links version - excellant concept map
http://informationarchitects.jp/webtrendmap3/trendmap2008.html
[1] ‘white space is, perhaps, the most important, [...] aspect of writing as visual design. According to James Hartley, a psychologist who studied the visual design of text, good use of white space can help a reader to: See redundancies in the text & thus faster reading; See more easily which bits of text are personally relevant for them, See the structure of the document as a whole; Grasp its organisation’ (Sharples, 1999, p.141).
[2] Joseph D. Novak studied the concept mapping technique in the 60’s at Cornell University.
mini bibliography
gerber, matt. (2008). Web trend map. http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-2008-beta/ Friday, January 25th, 2008
Sharples, Mike. (1999). How We Write: writing as creative design. Routledge, London
Google. (2007). Search – Cognitive Mapping
http://intraspec.ca/12montello.pdf. Montello, David. (2002). Cognitive Map-Design Research in the Twentieth Century: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches. Cartographic and Geographic Information Sciences, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.283-304
Google. (2007). Search – Cognitive Mapping
http://intraspec.ca/cogmap.php. John W. Coffey, Robert R. Hoffman, Alberto J. Cañas & Kenneth M. Ford. (2002). A Concept Map-Based Knowledge Modelling Approach to Expert Knowledge Sharing*, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola Fl, 32502, viewed 30 June 2007, http://www.ihmc.us/users/acanas/Publications/IKS2002/IKS.htm