Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Doing visualizations with Google News Lab

Here's the exciting ongoing project I mentioned before today: For the past few months I've been working with Google News Labs's Simon Rogers and a bunch of extremely talented and celebrated designers —Giorgia Lupi, Moritz Stefaner, Jan Willem Tulp, and others that will be announced in the future— to produce a series of ambitious visualizations based on Google search data. The first project in that series, WorldPotus, has just been launched.

Simon has written a very good post describing this initiative, and Wired is covering WorldPotus specifically. I won't repeat what's said in those articles. I'd just like to add that I'm being credited as an “art director” but, as you may guess, people of Giorgia's, Moritz's and Jan Willem's caliber don't need much art direction. My role as a consultant is to offer some initial ideas, draw visual mockups —that often get discarded!— and then give constant feedback during the development. It's a lot of fun, and I'm learning a lot from it.

(I'm also doing a monthly series of “office hours” with Google.)