Russell Davies

the political power of data visualisation

This is fascinating. As soon as you think about it you realise that dataviz is going to be a massive political tool. (And probably has been for decades/centuries - just not described that way.) I wonder if the UK political parties have got dataviz people on board, and dataviz analysts/spinners. I doubt it. But I bet they will have next time.

we all have the same resolution

There's a fantastic slide show with audio here about David Hockney's iPhone paintings. The app, and how he uses it, is obviously interesting. But what I thought was fascinating was the way the pictures get distributed - emailed to 20 or so friends, who are then expected to forward them to whoever they like. There is no original, everyone has the same resolution. That seems like the beginning of something new and interesting for 'painting'.

moving in

We moved into our new home today. Very good news.

day one

you have 949 days to comply

countdown from russelldavies on Vimeo.

I'm a real olympo-optimist. I think the olympics are going to be brilliant. But years of sci-fi movie countdowns have conditioned me to feel rather anxious living in the shadow of this on the BT Tower. It's exactly what evil aliens/baddies would do if they wanted to threaten London (those few aliens who don't start with California) - they'd hijack the BT Tower and glower over us all from up there. Countdowns are threatening. They just are.

magazine machines - compare and contrast

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Our friends at BERG have just made this lovely video/concept with/for Bonnier. It's called Mag+ and it embodies all sorts of clever thinking about porting magazines onto digital devices.

It's worth contrasting that with a similar exercise done by Time Inc, using Sports Illustrated. There are clearly loads of differences, one being the more considered designerly approach versus the brasher, more salesy one. But the most telling difference is that the BERG/Bonnier example seems focused on improving the experience and the Time one seems focused on preserving revenue. Now, preserving revenue is a noble aim, but the best way to get there is to think hard about users and their experience, not by trying to dazzle advertisers into thinking magazines are just like TV.

things you find out...

...from living opposite a hotel - hotels have false fire alarms all the time.

...from twitter - people lock themselves out of their houses all the time.

too many names

As you get older your head fills up with superfluous names - names you can't get rid of, but that won't be any use to you any more. People you worked with for a couple of weeks, 15 years ago on a different continent, people who ran the newsagents where your Mum and Dad used to live and all sorts of people from the media. Old newsreaders, French foreign ministers, Dutch swimmers. Mostly this is fine, these names are just the dusty gatherings in the back of your mind, but occasionally this bag of unregarded names gets jumbled up and unfortunate confusions ensues.

I, for instance, always confuse Peter Baynham (top comedy-writer but most resonantly in my head the very sad Welsh man from Fist of Fun) with Peter Fincham (TV executive occasionally talked about on media programmes). Not in a permanent way, I sort it out quite quickly, but still, always, when I'm reading about or listening to Peter Fincham I'm thinking about a lonely man in Balham in a filthy t-shirt. Presumably, given the limited amount of names in the world, this effect will only get worse and more and more people will get slightly confused in my head.

So apologies if I look at you vacantly at some point in the future.

top ten dumb '2010 things' I bet people will say...

...probably including me.

Number Ten: "Words With Friends Chat is the new Twitter"

friendly legal 2

Huge thanks for the helpful comments and emails on this post. Lots of useful stuff to look at there. The most practical model to me seems to be the full legal-speak version with additional human-readable notes - as per Vimeo and Hunch. It has the additional benefit that we can stick the lawyer-generated version up ASAP, which we need to do to get going and add the plain-English version later, when we have a moment to do it properly.