Here it is, a veritable compendium of every possible way of presenting, summarizing or comparing information on one plane. The periodic table of visualization methods — from visual-literacy.org — is a lot to digest. From the lowly bar chart to cognitive mapping and many points in between, this demonstrates that there is definitely more to the life of design than an endless array of tables. The meta-visualization itself is quite nice, too.
The Genealogy of Influence uses the technology of relationship clustering to visualize “the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture.” Click to explore the graph, hover to pull up bios, and double-click to read a Wikipedia article. Interesting presentation of a web of very complex (and, one must also add, subjective) information.
Woophy uses cutting-edge web design techniques to display photos on a world map. On hover, it shows thumbnails of cities or regions, and click gives you a closer look. This is an intriguing presentation of a mountain of files that would lose intrigue if presented as a text-based list.
Snap.com offers a free tool that creates thumbnail previews of links on your site. The user hovers over a link and a small preview of the site appears (with a small link to snap.com, of course).
I love that it’s free and very easy to install, but for my purposes there are a few drawbacks:
Still, it has great potential to make a site more usable (and beats learning how to code a preview-on-hover yourself).
Best Flash Animation 2006 — the stick figures finally get their revenge!
