If the Moon were only 1 Pixel.

I found this piece from my friend when i mentioned that i saw 7billionworld.com. He told me have you seen “If the Moon were only 1 Pixel?”. The interesting piece about this information visualization is that it doesn’t take advantage of a large data set. The solar system only has so many planets. What it does emphasize via computing is the distance from each planet, and how long it takes for you to scroll from one planet to the next. For our assignments we were told use a large data set so that we don’t have a reason not to do it in illustrator instead. This piece is something that also can not be done in illustrator because of the size rather than quantity of information. This piece is more beautiful than 7 billion world since it plays with scale in multiple ways such as size and distance.

8 Bit Cities

I first saw this piece in a documentary called “Smash Brothers” about rivalry between gamers from the East and West coast. I didn’t really think of this piece as information visualization, and did not know it was even “generative”. I thought someone just created it as an “painting”. It wasn’t until I it on infoaesthetics that I thought more about this piece. The author claims that it changes the skin of New York (and other cities) to create and adventurous vibe. I do believe that vibe was apparent in the documentary of “Smash Brothers” by showing this specific map as the rivalry players were taking road trips and meeting people in different towns. What makes this piece interesting is that it didn’t change the information “more visible”, but rather reskinned it so that we view the same information with a different connotation.