Canvas on Visual Cinnamon

Visualizing the Top Contributor Network of Any GitHub Repo

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog I want to show you the design process that went into creating the “Top Contributor Network” visual. Showing the ecosystem and synergy of the other repositories the top contributors of any GitHub repository have worked on.

How it started from a simple network, and became it’s own thing. How it involved endless tweaking, and how it then all broke, before growing into its final form.

You can find the interactive visual here (ps: it’s not really meant for mobile screens) and you can find all of the code and documentation for the visual here.

Charting Our Adventures: How I Created a Personalized Map with R, JavaScript, and more

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog, I’d like to show you how I created the map below of Senja, Lofoten & Vesterålen in Norway. Using a combination of tools, including the OpenStreetMap API, Amazon Web Services Terrain Tiles, R, d3.js, and JavaScript, I was able to create a unique and personal map that features our hikes, Google location history, and the locations we stayed at during our 5-month trip through Norway in 2022.

Intangible Cultural Heritage

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:15:47 +0100

Since 2003 UNESCO safeguards an ever growing list of our Intangible Cultural Heritage and these days there are almost 500 unique cultural elements inscribed on the list. Four interactive and unique visuals help people understand and discover their cultural heritage, and how this is connected to other cultures through connections such as regions, countries, World Heritage Sites and concepts such as Family, Trees, Dance, and more.

In March I was approached by UNESCO to help them visualize Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in such as way as to help people understand the connections that exist between them. They had already been creating the data set of connections in the year before that.

Culture Mapping

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The client, scenarioDNA, has a (patented) data-driven method that addresses the study of people and their ideologies over time. The best way to understand where ideas are going is to see where they live in the context of near neighbors and contrasting ideologies. They had an existing interactive tool that let their users explore the data and insights. However, this tool was perceived as being too dense and complex to understand. ScenarioDNA asked me to create a new version that would hold true to their patented approach, encourage users to explore, and be understandable. I created a fully functional visual prototype, based on their Food & Beverage dataset, and design for the surrounding UX elements.

Figures in the Sky

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

No matter where you are on Earth, we all look up to the same sky during the dark nights. You might see a different section of it depending on your exact location, time & season, nevertheless the stars have fascinated humans across time and continents. Our own creativity combined with stories about local legends and myths have created a diverse set of different constellations. And even though the stars don’t change, people have found many different shapes in the same sky. This interactive visual story looks into the differences & similarities between the constellations that 28 cultures, spread across time and across the World, have seen in the stars.

A Year in Flights

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 14:11:52 +0200

This data art piece conveys the intricacies of a year’s worth of flights performed by Transavia, a Dutch airline. Each flight is turned into an abstract shape whose appearance is completely determined by the meta-data of that flight. Together they create a piece that is unique and crafted only from Transavia’s own data that still conveys general trends (holidays, destination shifts depending on season, charter flights, etc.), while also having an artistic feel. The final piece, measuring 3m x 1.5m, was placed in Transavia’s office to remind employees about the vast amounts of data that they can use in their day-to-day work.

An Ode to Cardcaptor Sakura

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 14:52:04 +0000

Cardcaptor Sakura is one of the most beautiful and adorable manga series ever created and this project is my ode to the wonderful series. CCS was written and illustrated by the manga artist group CLAMP between 1996 and 2000, but is still extremely popular today. This visualization brings together several different aspects of the series; the main characters, the chapters, relationships and the wonderful cover art of each of the 50 chapters. By visually connecting these different aspects of Cardcaptor Sakura, fans can get a more nuanced understanding of the events that happen throughout the series.

Bussed out

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

How America moves its homeless | Each year, US cities give thousands of homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town. An 18-month nationwide investigation by the Guardian reveals, for the first time, what really happens at journey’s end. There are several data visualizations in this article. Many of which are created in a Scrollytelling style, where scrolling down the page will trigger animations in the data visualizations. Through these visualizations, video, photography, and of course, text, the article explains the impact of the homeless moving around the US. Both from the perspective of the homeless and the cities that are sending them away.

Breathing Earth

Wed, 24 May 2017 10:33:57 +0000

We all know that our Earth goes through a seasonal cycle, especially for the latitudes farther away from the equator. In the fall the “deciduous” plants lose their leaves only to grow back again in the next spring. The animation happening in “Breathing Earth” shows how 50.000 circles move through all 52 weeks of 2016 and visualize the seasonal cycles. Thereby displaying the how vegetation health changes throughout the year and how plant growth & decline occur on different times and scales in the many regions across the Earth.

Marble Butterflies

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 22:13:23 +0000

Driven by butterfly data, let these generative butterflies free across your screen to evolve & develop and be mesmerized as your screen fills up with colorful paths. This was a personal exploration of combining data with generative art to create something that is based on data, but wants to engage its audience first and foremost, instead of teaching its audience about (the numbers within) the data.

The data sketches topic for February was nature and to me, nature is guided by randomness; mutations that happen without reason are the existence of evolution. And what is generative art if not driven (in part) by randomness.

Royal Constellations

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 22:19:30 +0000

Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. This leads to very interesting & entangled family trees which the Royal Constellations visual tries to convey. Dive into the web of family relations to see how all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors. By hovering and clicking on one of the 3000 stars, each of which represent a person, the web reveals aspects such as 6-degrees of separation and shortest paths between two people.

Visualizing the “Beauty of Math” in 3 minutes

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A very short blog where you can find the slides and video of the 3-minute elevator pitch I gave at the Reasons to conference in Brighton, UK on Wednesday September 7th 2016. And as a bonus some images of things that didn’t make it!

Learnings from a d3.js addict on starting with canvas

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog I’d like to take you through my learnings from last week when I finally started with canvas. I hope that, after reading this blog, I will have convinced you that canvas is a really good visualization option if you need better performance than d3.js can give you and that it’s actually not that difficult to learn canvas.