Final Projects and Presentations

The end is near! Next Wednesday (May 7th) at 7:30pm we will have the Final Project Presentations and your completed Final Project is due (it must be online, linked to your blog, and functional!). We will meet in our normal classroom. Please be on-time.

The Presentation is informal: each student will spend 7-8 minutes showcasing their final project. Tell us what you set out to do, why you selected it, who your target audience is, how you created it, what challenges you encountered, and what you'd like to do if time were no option. The class and I will ask a few questions, and then you're done! Woo-hoo.

I will be holding additional hours on campus to help with your project issues. We'll pick some times in class tonight. Also feel free to send me an email at any point. Hang in there!

1 week left!

Tonight is the last regular class. All we have left is the final exam period next Wed, May 7th at 7:30pm. That is when the final projects are due and we'll have informal presentations of the projects (details coming).

As for tonight, this is the last "official" opportunity for feedback on your project. No lecture, but time to ask questions and get help. I also want to offer the big screen up front to anyone looking for some feedback. It was great to see Liza's animation last week and hear the comments from the class. No matter what state your project is in, it can be quite helpful to throw out your questions on design or layout or interface and see what the class says (you're not required to adopt any of it!). And again, even if you are still at a crude state, we might think of something that will help...

See you tonight!

More wonderful maps!

Internet maps:
Cybergeography is a website with extensive graphics and links to all sorts of interesting research. Lots of examples of complex datasets.

One particular example from UCSD

and at the other side of the spectrum...


A different topic, but a very interesting approach to visualizing a complex yet simple concept: the number of people in the world

A map I just found this week: estimation of risk

And a little bit of the art side of maps:
rug
Legos

Map Festival Week!

This week we continue our advanced features in Flash and look further into map and graphic design. Inspired by Tufte's "Graphical Excellence" I want to look at even more maps:

Static Maps:
Census 200 maps
NYC and London subway maps and modifications
Visualizations:
Flight and Expulsion
Earth Live (Discovery Channel)
Real time Wikipedia posting shown geographically (simple but neat)

Typography:
neat video that's appropriate for map makers

and just to keep up your yearning for maps:
National Geographic's Map of the Day

And for Lab 9:
The linkto the preloading steps. Please check out the other tutorials as well -- all I've tested have worked.

April has arrived!

And so we continue our look into maps and their design elements.

Today let's look some more into color:
Color is both empowering and overwhelming. It can transform a map in a fantastic way and it can also kill a map. Knowing how to use color is key.
The most popular cartographic color site is Cindy Brewer's ColorBrewer (catchy name, huh?). It is such a simple, easy to use starting point that I know direct all of my new map makers to the site to start their color journey.
The colourlovers blog is a great resource and just interesting to look through.
Kuler is an Adobe applet that is very handy as well.

Lab 7 Hints (Splash screens and rollovers)

I've received 2 questions on the splash screens and wanted to pass along these hints:

If you want to do your splash screen in the same scene as your animation, simply highlight all the frames in your animation (click on the top layer of the first frame of the animation, then shift-click on the bottom layer of the first frame, then shift-click again on the last frame of the bottom layer...that should highlight every frame of your animation), then click the highlighted frames and drag them further down the timeline. That will open frames at the beginning of your animation.

It may, however, be cleaner and neater to create a new scene for your splash screen that, at it's end, just plays the first frame of your animation. Just make sure your new scene appears listed before your animation scene in the "Scenes" window (Windows->Other Panels->Scenes). Flash plays the scenes in your movie in the order they appear in that window.

At the end of your splash screen scene, just add a "goto and play" script to the final frame, or add a button that allows your users to advance there on their own.


I also received a question about roll-overs (when everything, even the "hidden" part is "active"):

Double-click on your button (while the layer it's on is unlocked) so you enter the button edit mode. See if you have added "Down" or "Hit" states for the button. The key one here is "Hit" -- this defines the trigger area of the button. Without it specifically defined, it just assumes every element in the button is part of the trigger area. So, the easy fix is to add a keyframe in the "Hit" frame, draw a little box (any color...doesn't matter) over the area you want to trigger the pop-up (probably the text or button, not the popup part as well), then delete everything else in the frame. Just leave the little box you just drew.

Now the popup should only be triggered by the area you designated with that little box you drew in the "Hit" frame.

More questions or handy tricks? Post a comment to this post!

Wednesday, March 26th

Tonight we are going to start looking more into design issues and look into more visualizations.

Shaded Relief and Draping :
Tom Patterson is the shaded relief guru (he's a Cartographer at the National Park Service in Harper's Ferry). He is also a really nice guy! This is his site.
great site
Another good source of info: Hunter College Guide
Tufte on Imhof

Washington Post's Avian Flu Map
Newseum Flash map of the news
Obesity in America.This one presents a similar map style as to our current lab...how would you critique it?
FAA flight visualizations
Red Sea
U.S. home prices adjusted for inflation and plotted on a roller coaster. Really.

Article to read is by Tom Patterson.
Not a map per se, but you might find this video as neat as I do. Might make you feel a bit small in the grand scheme of things.

Web posting assignment for this week: Select and comment on one of the following:
More than 1100static maps. Try and find the actual site for the graphic you like.