Visuale

A bit of self promotion here on Visuale today!

It's my pleasure to introduce to you one recent work of ours: The Extended Excentric Labeling. It is an extension to the original interactive labeling technique called Excentric Labeling, which was developed by Jean Daniel Fekete and Catherine Plaisant in 1998 at the University of Maryland. We extended it to solve some problems present in the original version and it will be presented and published at the next EuroVis 2009 conference in Berlin, next June.

Here is the EuroVis'09 Paper (pdf) and a Video (mp4) we produced to showcase the technique.

I was talking with Ilya, a new PhD student in our department, the other day and in front of a prototype he developed he said something like: "oh yes, and I should find the right color mapping here but ... how?" Oh well ... good question! Originally I wanted to write a whole new post on it but after some reasonings I came to the conclusion that not only it is a daunting task but also and more importantly I don't know enough to seriously teach about it.

But wait a minute, does it mean I cannot help him and the ever increasing pool of poor color choosers? No, there is one thing I can do at least: share my list of favorite sources of information on color. And maybe add some tips and rules of thumb I often use for myself.

So, no more excuses to use poor color schemes. Here is my annotated list of resources, plus some personal tips.

Almost by chance I discovered there is a new Stephen Few's book coming out soon. It is has a wonderful title: "Now you see it" and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Few weeks ago I posted a blog post titled "Book for practitioners, not designer!" claiming that we are desperately in need of books that teach how to perform interactive visual data analysis. And this book looks like just the perfect response to what I expressed in my post. From the book description:

"Now You See It does for data analysis what Stephen Few's book Show Me the Numbers does for data presentation: it teaches simple, fundamental, practical techniques that anyone can use--only this time they're for making sense of information, not presenting it."

Wow, This is what I was looking for! A book that teaches how to analyze data with visual interactive tools. And one written for casual users, in need to analze some data in their work, not for highly skilled statisticians and engineers. And not for designers.

I'm really looking forward to reading it. I hope (I'm sure though) it will meet my expectation. Well done Stephen!

P.S. It has such a beautiful cover! Isn't it?