Writing

Seed Visualization

Update: As of January 1st, 2010, I’m no longer at Seed. Read more here.

Some eighteen months as visualization vagabond (roving writer, effusive explainer, help me out here…) came to a close in December when I signed up with Seed Media Group to direct a new visualization studio here in Cambridge. We now have a name—the Phyllotaxis Lab—and as of last week, we’ve made it official with a press release:

NEW YORK and CAMBRIDGE, MA (March 5, 2009) – Building on Seed Media Group’s strong design culture, Adam Bly, founder and CEO, announced today the appointment of Ben Fry as the company’s first Design Director. Seed Media Group also announced the launch of a new unit focused on data and information visualization to be based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and headed by Ben Fry.

Seed Visualization will help companies and governments find solutions to clearly communicate complex data sets and information to various stakeholders. phyllotaxisThe unit’s research arm, the Phyllotaxis Lab, will work to advance the field of data visualization and will undertake research and experimental design work. The Lab will partner with academic institutions around the world and will provide education on the field of data visualization.

And about that name:

Phyllotaxis is a form commonly found in nature that is derived from the Fibonacci sequence. It is the inspiration for Seed Media Group’s logo, designed in 2005 by Stefan Sagmeister and recently included in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA. “Much like a phyllotaxis, visualization is about both numbers and information as well as structure and form,” said Ben Fry. “It’s a reminder that beauty is derived from the intelligence of the solution.”

The full press release can be found here (PDF), and more details are forthcoming.

This is gonna be great.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 | iloveme, seed  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.