This week on Made by Many, there's an interview with Daniel Howells, a British web designer. One thing that I especially like is that he leans toward, simple, well-designed, grid-based website designs, which is what I feel like we'll be making. You can see some of the work his design firm has done for the magazine Dazed Digital. The design is kind of unusual because so much is on the homepage; the navigation isn't that important. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it's always good to look at something different.
And for Tuesday night's kind of crazy learning experiment, I teamed up with Pat Sweet to create a graphic that showed how many kids live in each census block in the Columbia Public School District using Google Fusion Tables. It's very similar to what Flash could do, but we didn't have to handcode all 5,000+ census blocks.
The hardest part was getting the data file small enough that we could use it. I think we spent a few hours testing different methods of getting the shape of the school district, which is actually about a third of Boone County. There are certainly things I wish I could change, and I have a feeling Google will fix some of these in the future. For example, I wish you could just roll over the school districts to see how many kids live there instead of clicking. But I'm also glad I didn't have to spend hours coding. For some great instructions on using Fusion Tables, go to John Keefe's blog.
Wow that google map seems like a lot of work! It turned out great though and displays the information in a unique way. It's much better than a chart graphic I think.
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