Information wants to be aesthetically pleasing

I’m drawn maps, charts of activity and ideograms and find them beautiful even when they are documenting one man’s conspiracy mania.

Which brings me to information aesthetics, a “weblog is based on the assertion that information visualization can be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience of users, instead of solely focusing on typical task effectiveness metrics” and stuff like that there.

And Andrew Vande Moere does a good job at finding some nice looking ones: example 1, example 2 and example 3. And then there’s the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River by Harold N. Fisk, 1944, which maps the ancient courses of the Mississippi River:

This is plate five of a fifteen plate set, all of which have been assembled into the stretch of the river(s) for your convenience right here.

A celebration of Boris

I discovered the art of Boris Artzybasheff by complete accident about seven years ago when I was taking some gift money to spend at Powells and arbitrarily pulled down Three and the Moon. As it was a worn, dusty blue book, I was startled by the bold illustration done in a fearless choice of colors. Not to mention finding a decidedly Polynesian styled dwarf in this collection Legendary Stories of Old Brittany, Normandy and Provence.

I was instantly smitten with Artzybasheff’s work and then quickly frustrated in finding anything else of his in print. I know most of his work via online galleries like the one linked to with the image above and eBay auctions. So how pleased am I that someone is intending to re-release a book of his I’ve long been curious about? Very pleased.

(Really, one of the things that has endeared me to BoingBoing is Mark Frauenfelder’s active interest in Artzybasheff.)