Maps are one of the most basic data visualizations that we have; we've been making them for millennia. But we still haven't perfected them as a tool for understanding complex systems — and with 26 lines and 468 stations across five boroughs, the New York City subway system certainly is complex. The KickMap is the result of my quest to design a more effective subway map, and ultimately to encourage increased ridership.

Via ReadWriteWeb:

Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the technology allows users to zoom out from the fish-eye pannable photos you see on standard street view options and instead see a series of flat panoramic photos stitched together like a timeline.

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

Charts and graphs have found their way into news, presentations, and comics, with users from art to design to statistics. The design principles for these data graphics will vary depending on what you're using it for. Making something for a presentation? You'll want to keep it extremely simple and avoid using a lot of text. Designing a graphic for a newspaper? You'll have to deal with size constraints and try to explain the important parts of your graphic.

However, whatever you're making your charts and graphs for, whether it be for a report, an infographic online, or a piece of data art, there are a few basic rules that you should follow.

About Strakhov Braslavskij: Russia, 1926

Braslavskij was known for his posters that promoted the emancipation of women. During this time in Russia, the idea of gender equality was growing. Emancipated women were seen to be supporters of the communist agenda, and so they needed to be freed from their so-called duties as wives and mothers…

…The curious thing is that the image shows not so much the emancipation of women as it does a way to turn women into men, dressing them in men’s clothing, showing them as working in factories, and hiding their femininity. It seems the real reason to emancipate women was simply to increase the workforce and thus strengthen the communist movement.

100 Years of Propaganda via Smashing Magazine.

Managing reputation can be tricky. Take a colleague of mine. As far as I know — and I know him pretty well — he’s a capable, intelligent and amiable fellow. Oh, and law abiding too. Yes, law abiding.

Why do I say that? Because if you search on the Google for him your second result will be for a convict with his exact same name. It’s come up when dealing with clients and potential employers. This usually happens after an awkward pause and goes something like this: “So, um, I hate to bring this up, um, but, ah… ah… you ever spend time in jail?”

No he hasn’t. And when explained there’s usually a laugh followed perhaps by another awkward silence.

Search “Colombia” and Ms. Colombia greets you.

I bring all this up because of a conversation this morning with my cousin. He wants to visit Colombia. He mentioned that when he did a search on the country, one of the first image results is of beautiful women. Sure enough, here it is.

This got me thinking. Usually when doing image searches for countries the first results are maps and flags. But what does the first results with people in it say about national character? How does it brand the country.

Brand Colombia: sultry.

Let’s try Iran. It’s in the news. The world’s talking about it non-stop. Negotiations go on in the UN Security Council to figure out how to halt the nation’s nuclear ambitions.

Here are the first humans we get via an “Iran” Google image search.

Iran’s digital reputation? Less Good.

Obviously not so good.

My cousin and I went back and forth on this for a while. We’d select a country and just like that, brand image in a search result.

Definite loser of the bunch after Iran is Mugabe’s Zimbabwe below.

Not only are there no maps and flags, the first result is just a disgusting abuse showing the horror of torture. The second image? A baton wielding cop chasing a civilian.

It’s interesting to watch how countries are starting to focus on digital diplomacy.

For better or for worse, many are coming to understand that much rests on actual digital reputation. That is, what topics trend in Twitter, what search results are seen on YouTube and Google.

Mugabe’s World of Nightmare

Better, what search results are buried and mostly forgotten.

National Public Radio recently had a story about Israel’s “pre-emptive PR” strategies for dealing in the Middle East.

Part of the country’s strategy to improve its image in the diplomatic world is to engage the social media world. This was most famously pursued during and after Gaza but diplomacy and reputation is a 24 hour a day, year-round affair.

The Israelis are keenly aware of this.

From All Things Considered:

Noam Lemelshtrich, dean of communications at IDC Herzliya, the university that hosted the conference, says Israel should be using new media — such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — to get its message across to a wider audience.

“I think we are handling this very, very poorly,” Lemelshtrich says. “It’s not being handled by professionals, it’s being handled by politicians. But fortunately, the Internet and social networks allow the people of Israel, who are much better than their government, to tell their stories to friendly crowds across the world in the United States and in Europe. So I am optimistic, because the new social medium allows us to bypass the government.”

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister he famously sought to rebrand dour England. The attempt was made to make Britain “cool”.

Today, the social Web takes that out of government hands and places it in our search results.

Update

Due to a personal reasons, I’d be remiss not to post the first anthropomorphic image when searching “Russia”. Not quite sure how to interpret this but here goes.

Related posts:

1. Video Search
2. LIFE Photo Archive Now Available on Google Image Search
3. Can Search Queries Track the Flu

If Helvetica was a documentary for the high-brow set, College Humor’s Font Conference is humor um… for the highbrow set?

Fonts gather to decide whether Zapf Dingbats is worthy of membership.

From the archives we bring you College Humor founder Josh Abramson interviewed by Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick to discuss online media, viral video, and how and where traditional media companies are striking out trying to get clever in their attempts to lure in the likes of you and I.

When the iPod came to market in 2001, technophiles waxed rhapsodic and it quickly became the must-have gadget among the geek chic.

Sales, of course, didn’t stop there. The pure lustiness of it all catapulted the device to iconic status with the iPod’s white headphones doing for consumer electronics what the Nike swoosh did for sneakers.

But what actually happened that brought the iPod to global status symbol while earlier MP3 players like the Diamond Rio ended up in the historical dust bin?

Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.

Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.

In the video above, John Kearon, Chief Juicer of market research firm BrainJuicer, and Earls discuss specific examples of this phenomenon, how the advertising and marketing industry has changed over the years, and what all this means for products, brands and those that create and market them.

This may seem overkill as you think that you can easily wrap your mind around what your portfolio site will include and how it will come together.

This is good practice though, especially if you work on integrated Web packages in the future that include audio, video, images and text.

At that time you’ll have to consider what content goes where, and how users get to that content (i.e., how they’ll click around to get from point A to point D).

Remember that wireframes are like blueprints. They show organization, not design. You can view the relationship between the two here.

You can use paper for this, or Photoshop if you want to continue learning how to use it before we meet again. In our next class we’ll flesh these out and begin to add the design layer on top of it.

For more complex projects, design architects often use Microsoft’s Visio (PC) or Omnigraffle (Mac) among others.

Remember as you do this, especially as you create navigation, that you might have future categories that you’ll want to add. This means that you’ll have to think ahead and allow for space to let your site grow.

Examples

Home Page 01 — Absolutely stripped down to a bare minimum. (View)

Home Page 02 — A variation on the Home Page, but now fleshing out where content is actually going to go, and what the content might actually be. (View)

Category (or Index) Page — An example of a category home page (commonly referred to as an index page, e.g., what does the Print index page look like). This shows how articles could be listed. (View)

Content Page — How are you going to actually present your clips? And if someone is reading one clip, how do they get to another in the fewest number of clicks? (View)