Giorgia Lupi of Accurat: Drawing and Designing Data Vis

"The fact then that since I can't have data on paper when I am sketching what comes to mind and designing a data visualization, I feel that it is very helpful to explore visual features and visual aggregations that start exactly from what you have in mind, and that can serve to open questions on the data itself. I see this as a shortcut from your head to the final piece of data visualization."

Three distinct phases for me in my design process:

A first phase when I am interested in the main macro categories of data we are analyzing;
second phase where I just focus on the singular elements, the entry points that we have, to figure out which shapes, colors, features we might invent to better represent them
Final phase where I would structure what I’d expect to finally create, not in illustrator (digital format), but on paper

Images and text courtesy Giorgia Lupi.
Full article is here.
Accurat website.

Territory Studio: Icons for The Guardian

A sparkling example of how deep an icon starts to look when you place a grid behind it, although in this case, these are masterfully designed icons! Here's a link to the full presentation. #guardian #icons

Icons from Pu-Ergh tea pack

Icons from garbage truck

Charley Peters - Drawings in Space

Drawing can articulate our relationship to space and location, and the experiential act of drawing in-situ is central to how we record the world and our encounters with it. Experiences of drawing on location also allow an exploration of the nature of drawing itself, its relationship with materials, processes and the drawing surface.

Charley Peters, Drawing in the Reality of Space, TRACEY, 2014

CHARLEY PETERS, LOGICAL ATOMISM (2012), ACRYLIC YARN AND FISHING WIRE IN SPACE

Artist website: http://www.charleypeters.com/

Lorenzo Martini, Allegory of Good Government, 1338-39

Icons from Post Office

New Norwegian banknotes

Source: Norges Bank

A short film about Times New Roman and why we shouldn't use it

Source:Times

Iconography from Moscow metro ticket

Dubuffet drawing

Source: http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/155/w500h420/CRI_210155.jpg

Jerwood Drawing Prize, September 2014

Jerwood Drawing Prize is "the largest and longest running annual open exhibition for drawing in the UK" (Source: http://jerwoodvisualarts.org/jerwood-drawing-prize-2014) First prize this year went to Alison Carlier, the first time in history when a Drawing Prize is awarded to audio work. I've recorded an exerpt - but actually, forget my bad self-recording, here's a link to it on SoundCloud

Here's a fragment of work by Hilary Ellis, Enigma II (thread on paper)

A fragment of Zoe Maslen's The Absents Presence, Hair drawing (pencil drawing on Fabriano paper)

Writing on drawing

It is fine to say, as many do, that drawing is good for you, but so is singing, and so is the Eurovision Song Contest. The high octane drawing of the twentieth century greats – Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, Dubuffet, de Kooning, Tàpies, Polke, would be on my list, and certainly Daniel Clowes – is more than this. It breaks through the ‘sound drawing’ decorum preached in the pages of The Studio.Pride, prejudice and the pencil. James Faure Walker. From Writing on Drawing, p. 90

Frank Gehry drawing

Frank Gehry drawing Source:http://kwc.org/blog/archives/resources/2005/gdrawing.jpg

Leonardo - accidental images

‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.’Leonardo Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/deliberate-accident-art

Thomas Malton, A Complete Treatise on Perspective in Theory and in Practice, London, 1776

‘When we look at a road which sweeps before us toward the horizon, we must not say either that the sides of the road are given to us as convergent or that they are given to us as parallel; they are parallel in depth. The perspective appearance is not posited, but neither is the parallelism’. Source: Merleau-Ponty M. (1962). p. 261.

Great internet discovery: Monoskop

A great Friday morning is glorified by a great internet discovery called Monoskop - a collaborative wiki research on the history of art, culture and media technology.

The Large Glass, Marcel Duchamp, 1915-23

Source: Wikimedia

Paul Klee on Modern Art

55. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, p. 53: "The legend of the childishness of my drawing must have originated from those linear compositions of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete image, say that of a man, with the pure representation of the linear element. Had I wished to present man 'as he is,' then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have been vagueness beyond recognition."

Source: A Thousand Plateaus; Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari; p. NOTES TO PP. 342-350 □ 551