Sunday, July 7, 2013

Mike Bostock's beautiful examples


Eyeo 2013 - Mike Bostock from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

One of the things that amazes me about the fields related to infographics and visualization (scientific visualization, information visualization, data visualization, news graphics, information design, etc.) is that they tend to attract people with a keen willingness to share all they know, and help others. I mentioned that in the interview with John Grimwade in The Functional Art, (read it for free), but the comment can be extended to many other folks. Sure, we may have to endure a self-serving, pretentious cretin every now and then —if you have some experience, make an informed guess,— but most people you will meet in conferences, presentations, workshops, are good-natured, down-to-earth, and friendly. We're lucky.

I've never met Mike Bostock in person, but it seems to me that he belongs to this group. Bostock designed the D3 Javascript library, which is been widely used to create visualizations today. As I mentioned a week ago, I'm trying to learn how to use it myself. I'm relying mostly on Scott Murray's Interactive Data Visualization for the Web, but the supporting documentation provided by Bostock himself (here, here) seems to be superb. Please watch his talk at Eyeo 2013 above, and read the related article in which you can explore all the examples he showed. Enjoy.