Like many folks in America, I watched the election results stream in through television and Internet sources. The television cnn experience was fabulous in a cheesy, over-the-top kind of way that we’ve come to expect of our tv news. I thought the hourglass display of exit poll survey data was very nice and I wish they had posted it on the web. On the Web, I liked the dailykos interactive map for pure usability (easy to read graph of electoral votes and the ability to zoom into each state to see results per county). However, the visual design of the NYTimes was, as usual, quite lovely: readable with clear navigation (also with the zoom in county results feature).

Each of the sites I looked at was well done. The production values were high and I can imagine what kind of prep went in making these interactive visualizations happen. I was dismayed to see no credits to the individuals who created these pieces. Every photo in the New York Times has a credit, why not the information graphics and interactive charts? If anyone knows the stories behind these, please let me know. I’m very interested in the people who made them and the stories behind the work, whether it be the design process or the data feeds. With any luck, some of these folk are bloggers.

Daily Kos (click for full size images):

clicking on a state would zoom into election results per county:

NYTimes

CNN

CBS News

“The boundaries between art and engineering exist only in our minds.”

I love the fluid feel of Theo Jansen’s work. (It’s worth looking up some of his other creations on YouTube.) This one feels like some kind of mystical wind creature. Most impressive, though, is the way that this extraordinary act of engineering is made to seem effortless.

Jon Udell writes about brandtags.net, an experiment in identifying brand associations. As much as marketing folks work hard to create a brand, at the end of the day, the brand is defined by your associations. This site attempts to capture those from its audience.

Most often a brand is defined by its flagship product. Campbells is soup. Google and Yahoo are search. Adobe is photoshop. However, Microsoft is evil.

The cloud tag visualization is nice, but the top words are way too large when displayed in “orderly view.” They should lose the word scaling if ordering by popularity, I think… or else figure out how to adjust the scale so the biggest font is not quite so big.