Amazing Photography of Yan Yongliang
These photos by Yan Yongliang absolutely blow me away. I love how he has mixed traditional techniques with modern photography to create these haunting, powerfully, moving series of images.
The image above come from a series based on Shan shui paintings. These type of paintings stem from a history that goes back more than 1,500 years ago and the images often depict scenes of natural landscapes and beautiful scenery. It’s a tradition that demands a rigorous set of requirements in the hopes of creating the perfect combination of balance, composition, and form.
Yang Yongliang’s work takes these requirements and then turns them on their head – tranquil surroundings become chaotic landscapes as old trees become large skyscrapers and gentle mists become billowing smoke. The finished result creates powerful and contemporary images that speak of the modern world and the concerns of our time.
View more examples on The Fox is Black
Infographic of the Day: The Global Timber Trade
This brilliant graphic by Section Design for GOOD takes an extremely detailed look at the world’s timber trade, where the timber comes from and where it ends up. Although a little difficult to read in places, the concept is executed perfectly, and the graphic looks stunning, successfully managing to display such a large amount of data in a comparably small space.
Due to the size limitations of GOOD’s site, and the sheer amount of information presented, some of the text is a little hard to read and you can’t tell the difference between some of the coloured lines so I would love to see an even larger version of this graphic so I could fully appreciate it in all its glory.
It’s a perfect example of how large amounts of data can truly look beautiful when freed from the constraints of a boring old spreadsheet.
View full graphic on GOOD
Infographic of the Day: Pollution Atlas
This detailed atlas by The Guardian takes a look at CO2 emissions and displays a country’s size by the amount of carbon dioxide it produces. As you can see the African continent appears to be significantly smaller compared to it’s actual size, whereas China and the US dominate the map (unsurprisingly!)
The map, is produced by Guardian graphic artists Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton. It shows a picture of a world where established economies have large - but declining - carbon emissions. While the new economic giant economies are growing rapidly. This newly-released data is from 2009 - the latest available.
The data is interesting and it is a clever way of viewing so much information, but my only criticism is that countries that emit smaller amounts of CO2, a fair number in Africa and South America, do not have their names alongside their circle. When using circles to represent data, you will always come across the issue of displaying labels when the circle gets small. Here, I’m a little disappointed to see, that country labels were merely just left off. Now, I’m not particularly familiar with the location of specific middle African countries, so when curious about which countries in Africa produce small amounts of CO2 I had to use the table at the bottom to cross reference the data… a very large table with very small text…
I like the graphic, I think it gets the point across well, I guess I just would have liked to have seen a cool way of displaying the country labels… maybe making it interactive would have helped here…
View full graphic and article on The Guardian
I Learned Something Today…
I just learned about Supercells after seeing NASA’s picture of the day today. The first thing that came to my mind was that they look exactly like the spaceships in Independence Day when they first appear over major cities. Don’t you think?
