VizThink Europe Discount Code!

I know many of my readers would really enjoy the conference VizThink Europe, and the conference is coming up quickly.  The Europe version is in Berlin, Germany this year on October 12-14 at Crown Plaza Berlin City Centre.

We'll have lots of opportunities for hands on experiences, learning from industry gurus, and networking with your visual thinking peers. We'll be bringing a few of your favorite facilitators from San Francisco with all new content, plus a whole lot of new facilitators from Europe.

The great guys at VizThink have created a discount code for readers of Cool Infographics.  Use the code BCRK01 when you register to get €50 ($75-$80 in U.S. dollars these days) off any regular attendance fee (not student, Government or non-profit rates).

If you can get to Berlin (and I have a lot of readers from Europe), you would really get a lot from attending.

Big thanks to the guys at VizThink!

Olympic Wrap-Up

To complete the week of Olympic Infographics from the NYTimes.com, they have created a page to summarize all of the infographics they created.  They've been adding to it every day, so it won't actually be complete until the Olympics are over.

Olympics Schedule Tracker

The Olympics Tracker is an interactive schedule of the events.  It now only shows which events are scheduled each day and hour, but you can drag them to rearrange your favorites to the top.  Clicking on past events shows the results, and clicking on future events shows the upcoming event details.  Medal awarding events marked with a small medal icon.  You can even download a desktop version for Mac or Windows.

The Ropes at Disney

Found on CartoonBrew, this circular chart from 1943 shows the development process of an animated film through the different roles within the Disney organization.  Not exactly an org chart, this is more of a process map.

How do they make those drawings move?  This chart, an separate pull-out from the 1943 booklet, The Ropes At Disney’s (see below), explains the whole process.You’ll note that it all starts with “Walt”. And his main focus was “Story” and “Direction”.

Can you tell I’m going to Walt Disney World today?

The Art of Visual Thinking

Last week, Guy Kawasaki posted a good interview with Dan Roam on his blog.

Do you recognize this picture? It's how Southwest Airlines was pitched.

To provide more insight into the process of visual thinking, I tapped Dan Roam. He is the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures . In this interview he explains why and how to use visual thinking in your business. Click here to read it. To learn even more about visual thinking, be sure to read his book.

Small Gambling Addiction Spending Visual

I love this very simple but powerful visual comparison of the gambling revenues and the money spent on gambling addiction support programs.  The author is only trying to communcate one point, and gets his message across very stongly.  I believe it was done by Tim Broderick, from the Daily Herald.

Found on InfographicsNews.blogspot.com.  Looks like Chiqui Esteban is starting a series of visual comparison graphics over there.

Anatomy of a Balloon Animal

Now here's an odd poster by Jason Freeny depicting the internal anatomy of balloon animals.  Check it out along with his other works at Moist Productions.  I especially liked that he included visual instructions on how to create the balloon animal at the bottom.

Thank Torquil for sending in the link!

Radiohead: House of Cards visualization video

Really cool use of visualization tools to create this music video for Radiohead's "House of Cards".

Check out this link to a different version on Google that lets you move the video image around while its playing. and the "making of" video that shows the laser scanners they used.

Radiohead just released a new video for its song "House of Cards" from the album "In Rainbows".

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data

What Software do you use for Infographics?

OmniGraffle

A few readers have written emails to me asking about what software to use to create infographics.  My needs are pretty simple for my day job, so I only have a handful of tools that I use loaded onto my MacBook.  But the graphics I create are fairly simple, and don’t use massive amounts of data.

• OmniGraffle
• FreeMind
• MindNode
• Vector Designer
• Microsoft Office

Yes, I included MS Office in the list because there are some really cool things you can do with Excel and PowerPoint.  I’ll post some examples in the future.

What software do you use?

Post about your favorite software in the comments and share your “must have” software with everyone here.

Map of Online Communities

Greetings from the Blogipeligo!

A fun infographic from xkcd.com that uses a map image to communicate the relative sizes of the different types of online communities.  I was impressed that I at least recognized most of them, and actually participate in some of them.