Vism.ag & Creative Maps Blog

30 Free Useful Websites for Online Promotion

This visualisation was made to help inform and advertise on how easily and effectively you can use the web 2.0 tools to build an online presence through free sites, feeds, embed and monitor progress/stats.

There are more that I have started to use and need to integrate at some point (they were just embeddable widgets).

feedburner.com google’s feed aggregator, splice in Del.ici.ous links or amazon and ping your blog posts to different services postrank.com blogpost ranking widget, show readers your popular posts technorati.com blogpost organiser/aggregator pinging and rating among your categories of blogs. facebook.com share & connect hostpapa.com (not free, but cheap and can host many sites) I share a friends web hosting uk2.net (not free, but cheap and easy to integrate with hostpapa) bought an yearly domain .com £8.99 linkedin.com professional networking, set up your own groups vi.sualize.us (update: vi.sualiZe.us - not with an s) visual social bookmarking toolbar delicious.com social bookmarking toolbar blogger.com google’s blogging platform flickr.com share photos/artwork with groups and friends visualisationmagazine.com my website for my data visualisation magazine free to see online (using issuu, search it in my blog posts) chriswatsondesign.viviti.com my homepage of activities, viviti lets you build a basic website to promote if you dont have your own host or dont want to learn html etc.

issuu.com

share books with an online viewer either public or private (still embeddable, private is little more awkward to implement, see

http://visualthinkmap.blogspot.com/2009/10/self-publishing-visualisation.html) twitterfeed.com share feeds auto on twitter, your blog, your del.ici.ous, vi.sualise.us, flickr (anywhere with a feed) twitter.com microblogging 150 word updates getsatisfaction.com free online customer services, embeddable widgets and brandable with your own header etc. ning.com create a social network and add pictures, website links, blog posts, videos, linked to flickr, you tube.... very good. add html data. createspace.com free online publishing tools, books, cds, video affiliate-program.amazon.com earn money through product placement

sharethis.com share posts/links anywhere, such s twitter all those services, whatever you use, tumblur, stumble upon its listed.

addthis.com share posts/links anywhere as like share this.

addtoany.com share posts/links anywhere as like share this. geekchart.com show where you share, more novelty but interesting nonetheless for visitors wanting to know where to follow you best.

feedjit.com

show where your traffic comes from in the world.

clustrmaps.com show where your traffic comes from in the world. sitemeter.com site visitor stats goingup.com (not signed up yet, but looks good) earn money through stats popuri.us site rank stats, where are you on google page rank, alexa, yahoo back links etc. e-zeeinternet.com free embeddable counter, no subscribing/details needed. just your url of where its going.

this was a great post, many that i need to have a look at and probably use,

desizntech.info/2009/10/22-really-useful-online-tools-for-web-designers-and-bloggers/ If you know of any more really useful and excellent sites/services that are free on the web please let me know. ADDITION: http://www.ubervu.com/ widget free to track stats of where your site - link goes accross the web

Design

It was quite a challenge, I wanted to avoid the amount of edge crossings with the lines. This isn't that easy as you can imagine to avoid the amount of edge crossings, if there are too many like in the diagram below it can reduce the readability mentioned upon by Lau & Vande Moere.pdf, pg 1 (infosthetics.com) and referred too as Good Continuity in the Gestalt Laws of Perception for effective visual communication in Cartographic Design: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, from John Wiley & Sons Inc.

So I had to re-arrange the different sites quite a few times as it is quite easy to make them all integrate, such as rss/atom feeds directly being fed to different sites, or being able to embed items into blogger, websites etc. As you would expect from today's web 2.0, you want them all spidering each other and linked and easily integratable with each other it generates a lot of lines (not that easy to distinguish which sites can link, embed with each other). I thought about using colour to differentiate between embed links and rss links.

I think there are 13 edge crossings (making it look like spaghetti and hard to follow, causing conflicts and burdening cognitive load and reducing readability and ease of engagement as you interact with it, inevitably giving up with it, 'oh **** that!'). That 13 is a high number, trust me it could have been worse, but i try to get round that by giving a perception of depth and differentiating line quality so that they arent the same and the eye can still maintain good continuation, as Gestalt say, for the reader and the designs readbalility (think there is a test that scores the readability of text, see Hrant Paparazin 'Improving the tool' in Graphic Design and Reading: exploring an un-easy relationship by gunnar swansson.

I help when they come to going along the differentiated dashed line from Visualisation Magazine or Flickr that I added a depth too by also adding rigid straight lines contrasting the flowing curved solid lines (lots of contrasts to differentiate).

I also straightened the lines making them parallel such as to the left hand side of Blogger (orange b), Or underneath Blogger connecting to Ning. Helps with the Common Fate (Gestalt) and again easier to follow the individual lines. Simliar to TeleGeography with their parallel lines springing from countries.

Below are links to Picassa. Please observe image copyrights to their owners. Use these to have ago your self at creating a web 2.0

Published on 2009/10/26 4:02 pm.
Filed under: design, free, generator, how to, html, information, online, tool, web 2.0, websites

Colour Wheel Associations

colour wheel associations by computer arts mag

brand associations that are connoted by certain colours. great wheel to help have an awareness of what colours mean what.

Published on 2009/06/14 8:33 pm.
Filed under: association, brand, colour, design, emotion, how to, interpret, meaning, money, perception, wheel

Self Mapping

mileage - annual report - Nicholas Feltron’s

music - annual report - Nicholas Feltron

reading habits - annual report 07 - nicholas feltron

Visualise yourself, what would you display to an audience? how intimate would you make it? Well even though he has been doing them from 2005 I have just discovered them by Nicholas Feltron. With very minimal styles but nice clean, clear, infographics and bold numbers encased in this swiss style grid system to keep some structure and rigidity to his diverse information of his life.

I am curious how he records all this data to be absolutely accurate, it must be some focsed, disciplined time keeping and number crunching.

Why? When quizzed, Felton’s admits that ‘it satisfies a real curiosity that I have about my habits. Why is it a popular document? If there are numer ous people out there who think it is fascinating and don’t even know me… imagine how fascinating I find it’. At first your reaction is ‘Oh please….’ but soon you are scouring the pages to see which was the most visited restaurant, his most-drunk beer: a sort of typographic Truman Show, authored by Truman himself.

It is intersting how the CR blog author describes it as a sort of typographic Truman Show.

http://feltron.com/

there are previous versions there.

found here: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/me-myself-and-i/

Published on 2009/01/16 3:22 pm.
Filed under: brockmann, clean, complex, data, design, geographic, how to, map, mobile, seeing, self, strange, swiss, visual maps, visualisation

Visual Body

Here are some creative visualisation like the video above of excellant
mapping into
displaying the inner workings of the human body. Really creative, full coloured
animated depiction of the human arteries really imaginative insight.

Really neat promotional video from the hybridmedicalanimation.com.

found here: http://coolinfographics.blogspot.com/2008/08/awesome-medical-visualizations.html

The visible body is no less imaginative, informative and detailed with its
full coloured deptictions. They quite rightly state that they can be used
for:

Instructors:

Use it in the classroom to show structures and their relationships.

Students:

Use it as you study to help you visualize and memorize.

Health Professionals:

Use it in your office or exam room to teach patients about their conditions.

Everyone:

Use it to explore and learn about your amazing human body

from here: http://www.visiblebody.com/tour_what_is_it;jsessionid=pPpAedIMBWbVtqkfn115Nw**.node2

found here: as-map.com - post: How it's done it?

Although these visualisations may not be as highly creative depicting the
human body with its silky intricacies, smooth colours without the more intimate
depth perception created by with the 3d perspective they are still as
informative.

from here: http://www.infovisual.info/03/043_en.html

Published on 2008/09/20 11:56 am.
Filed under: 3d, abstract, animation, cell, clean, colour, creative, diagram, how to, information, looking, perspectives, visualisation

World of Art Game

This was a great diagram I discovered that helps understand/simplify some of the complexities of the art world in an excellantly designed visualisation.

Adelheid Mers subverts this diagrma of rather than being just a diagram he would transform it into a game, with players following the artists.

Start life at college, finish with a clear mind. It has excellant pictographic symbols of people/places with clean, soft contrasts/graduation of monochromatic colours.

'ABOUT WORLD OF ART: Curator Mary Jane Jacob had seen the diagrams after Lakoffat the Chicago Open Studio, and commissioned me to create a poster for a workshop symposium she was organizing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago:

"Setting Up Your Art and Your Life - Strategies for a Sustained Practice".

The idea was to create a diagram of an artist, not based on a book, but on my own expertise. Conjuring up elements I wished to include, it first became apparent how crowded the world of art is (artists, audiences, curators, juries, dealers, students, critics, historians etc.), then how many locations are involved, and then, in discussion with Mary Jane, it became very clear that how we value the players and the locales varies greatly as well.

As the task was not to diagram my personal belief system, two design possibilities presented themselves: to indicate all possible varieties, or to make a game in which all possibilities are evoked. The game seemed to be appropriate, and it was printed on the rear of the poster that announced the symposium, as a treat of sorts. Later I also printed a larger version and made game pieces to go along with it'.

found: http://thediagram.com/5_1/mers.html

link featured: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/355002597/

high res: http://thediagram.com/5_1/mers_woa.pdf

Published on 2008/08/11 8:16 pm.
Filed under: clean, communication, composition, connections, creative, diagram, game, how to, looking, monochrome, multidirectional, simple, subvert, visualisation, world

Visually Identifying Zombies

The Common Craft Show is a series of short explanatory videos by Lee and Sachi LeFever. Our goal is to fight complexity with simple tools and plain language. We call our format "paperworks" and publish a new video about once a month.

Wonderful visual thinking accompanied by narrative. Zombies in plain english show the subtle humour of the plain english videos. there are ones for Blogs in plain english, RSS, Wikis, Social Networking, Online Photo Sharing. Brilliant.

Published on 2008/05/11 11:19 am.
Filed under: abstract, animation, communication, graphic, how to, illustration, knowledge, language, meaning, narrative, seeing, simple, sketch, strange, visual thinking, visualisation, white space, words

Making of: Honda Problem Playground

With these ideas of communication skills, problem solving & drawing being essential qualities needed to visually think & design - solve, Viz Think 08, what a wonderful way to visualise problem solving than with the brimming creativity, innovation flowing from the pours of Honda advertising.

This is a great video about the making of, design of the Problem Playground.Honda commercials are about finding out real truth that the company loves problems. They wanted to visualise their thinking strategy which led them to problem playground.

The use of large scale puzzles was to serve as a metaphor that a problem needs solving, and the size for spectacle. It is human nature to enjoy a puzzle. With a little help from Speed cubist david calcvo and others Honda create another brillant ad.

Published on 2008/05/03 2:41 pm.
Filed under: creative, designs, honda, how to, innovative, playful, problem, puzzle, solving, thoughts, visual thinking, visualisation