I’ve posted about this before, but apparently it’s a thing in systematics - the radial cladogram. Not only are they really cool, but the more I look at them, the more I realize they are a really excellent way to illustrate the relationships between species.
I’m still not done with this claim. I gave up after a couple of hours. I imagine I’ll be spending a good chunk of my weekend on this.I am currently trying to submit a claim for out-of-network services to my health insurance. I’ve done this before with my old insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and I thought that process was abstruse, but it wasn’t too odious and it got done to my satisfaction. Well, my company recently changed insurers and I now realize how spoiled I was. I would just like to take a moment to talk about the claim form I am faced with and what it demonstrates about the unfathomable levels of stupidity that humans are capable of.
By way of Information Aesthetics comes Web Without Words, which is a project to take a popular web site and reduce it to boxes to get a broad view of the site’s layout. It’s an interesting exercise. The initiated among you will recognize this as a crude wireframe. Normally, we don’t work backwards like this (take a design and wire it), but on occasion we do and it might be worth doing during projects as well.
If you reduce your design to blocks you can do a quick gut assessment of whether or not you’ve got your hierarchy right and it’s matching up to the original work you did on organizing that content in the first place. If it falls down, then do it again.
Of course, if you’ve read my previous rant about the problem with web design, then you would know that if you were doing design right, it would look an awful lot like the boxes anyway, so no need for the devolution exercise.
I’m a designer. Well, these days I get paid to be an information architect. But I am a designer by training. And a web designer by experience.
I also have an iPhone, and I’ve gotten into using Google reader to bring the world to my doorstep. Reader shows up on the iPhone in its mobile version (which I like) and I have opted to use the “Reformat linked web pages for mobile” feature (which I like a lot).
That feature alludes to everything that is wrong with the web.
A theme that seems to be running through my professional life lately is complexity. More specifically, the making of things more complex when you don’t really have to. Everyone does this (well, I think; it could just be me; I am given to overthinking things).
Am example: at work recently we were tasked with illustrating a design concept through a scenario. This gets done every day And every time we try to invent a new and better way to do it. That’s largely because I haven’t seen a good way to do it. And also because of the demonic grip of Powerpoint on our clients.
At any rate, what we came up with, via a feedback loop of overcleverness, was a system that would allow us to output our scenario as one big poster, as a PDF, or as images to build into a Powerpoint preso. All from the same artwork. I was pretty pleased with myself.
As you might guess, being outside the issue, our grand vision didn’t materialize and what we ended up with was a Powerpoint that was exceedingly complicated and tedious to modify.
What I thought was a smartly flexible system that would enable lots of different output formats became a beast that was efficient for none of them.
The lesson - which you would think was obvious but certainly wasn’t in this case: solve the problem you got, not every damn problem you can think of.
If we’d picked a format and moved forward, we’d be a lot happier. Sure, if the client wanted us to change later, we’d have a problem. But that wasn’t the problem we got.
This is sweet. Phylogenetic tree showing the evolutionary relationship of nearly all of the known dinosaur species. Which is to say, what dinosaurs descended from what other ancestor dinosaurs and in what order. And it’s in a circle to make it super-cool.
It was created as part of a study at the University of Bristol that looked at when dinosaur diversity happened (dinosaurs evolved over a hundred million year period; they wanted to know what part of that range showed the most branching of new species).
They’re all there. Neatly grouped. They’re in latin, but that’s okay.
I strongly urge you to download the PDF of the supertree. Your ten-year-old would like it painted in mural form on his bedroom wall.
Reference: Graeme T. Lloyd et a,l Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, July 23 2008.
Image above by Graeme Lloyd
A while ago, I ran across this page about sequence logos. The description of what a sequence logo actually is is a little obtuse (it’s an aligned sequence of binding sites, but what’s the zero position in the graph?). Regardless, they’re pretty cool.
I’m a designer/information architect/information designer and I like data visualizations. This kind is pretty simple - one might even say crude, but it fulfills its purpose in a pretty nifty fashion. I’m not a molecular biologist (is there a cool intertubes acronym for that? If so, I might be using it often - let’s say it’s IANAMB just to humor me) so I have no idea if these are actually useful, but I still think it’s pretty sweet.
Above image: T. D. Schneider and R. M. Stephens, Sequence Logos: A New Way to Display Consensus Sequences
Saw this poster in the subway on my way home today (actually it was a modified version that was formatted for a horizontal subway slot).
I find the illustrations upsetting somehow. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Also, it’s from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and it turns out there’s an academic paper about it.
