marumushi.com

[aversion]

www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

amazing flash app that maps out the news.

it's nice to see someone using the abilities of flash to expand to the size of the browser window without warping. I think this is an important feature of flash that can help it overcome some of the prejudice that comes from people more familiar with HTML sites.

[absolutezero]

Great find Aversion. That is one intense website. I had a look at his other projects and were on the same scale of originality. Amazing stuff that you would never have thought people were trying to do in flash.

[flipsideguy]

I don't know... it's "nice" but extremely busy. I don't think this is good design, but "cool" nonetheless.

/Flip.

[Johnny Shiro]

Idea is good but the layout is messy on the scale of "Extreme 10" I dont know where to focus on

[nerv_03]

I think it's a successful design because there is a lot of content on the screen and it is easy to differentiate between pieces of content. Yes it may take a while for your brain to adjust to it but it has a very short learning curve. It is not a perfect design and the text is hard to read but it is the most creative design I've seen for content.

[aversion]

It's information design, which is a whole subset of graphic design. There are elements to it, such as the filter buttons, which are based on normal design principles but the rest of it is an exercise in demonstrating the relative importance and ranking of a set of data, in this case news. The size of the text is dictated by the coverage given to a news story, if something is really small it means it has received little attention. Chaos is part of the point. It's not meant as a practical news reader, the layout may contain a lot of information but that's the whole point of the exercise.

Personally I think the layout is the exact opposite of "messy". This guy has taken a varying set of data and used metadata design to create a flowing layout that displays the data and its attributes perfectly. I've not seen such good design in a long time.

[big_k]

wow... thats nuts. great peice of design and programming, as well as a very origional idea.

[nevil]

Originally posted by aversion
It's information design, which is a whole subset of graphic design. There are elements to it, such as the filter buttons, which are based on normal design principles but the rest of it is an exercise in demonstrating the relative importance and ranking of a set of data, in this case news. The size of the text is dictated by the coverage given to a news story, if something is really small it means it has received little attention. Chaos is part of the point. It's not meant as a practical news reader, the layout may contain a lot of information but that's the whole point of the exercise.

Personally I think the layout is the exact opposite of "messy". This guy has taken a varying set of data and used metadata design to create a flowing layout that displays the data and its attributes perfectly. I've not seen such good design in a long time.

if you know this info before entering the site mabe the site would make lots of sense, but without knowing this it jst looks terrible, I couldn't focus on anything and gave up!

[stevietat]

its very cool in terms of the visula heirarchy and browser resizing. id like to know how they feed off googles news system unless they have some official relationship.

but the readability is brutal. the size contrasts are way to big (some of the small ones aren't even readable, so why even put it there) and who is used to reading vertically aligned headlines?

design wise, it looks nice, like some funky typography experiment. compare it to sites like googles actual news page and its a piece of art. but once you look past that and start browsing it for news, other than the 2-4 giant headlines, everything else just gets lost on me. and id much prefer to go back to google news. to me, it looks nice but thats it.

[aversion]

Originally posted by stevietat
its very cool in terms of the visula heirarchy and browser resizing. id like to know how they feed off googles news system unless they have some official relationship.

but the readability is brutal. the size contrasts are way to big (some of the small ones aren't even readable, so why even put it there) and who is used to reading vertically aligned headlines?

design wise, it looks nice, like some funky typography experiment. compare it to sites like googles actual news page and its a piece of art. but once you look past that and start browsing it for news, other than the 2-4 giant headlines, everything else just gets lost on me. and id much prefer to go back to google news. to me, it looks nice but thats it.

that's the whole point of it. It's not meant as a way of browsing news, it's information graphics, it's similar to an art installation, it demonstrates visually the relationships between data. If somethign is too small to read then it's place in the news is relatively inconsequential and your frustration at not being able to read it is part of the point of it being so small.

I understand people wanting to use it as a way of browsing the news, that's natural, but as a piece of design that's not what it's meant for. It's a visual delineation of the importance placed on different news stories by the media.

you can criticise it for not be a very usable way of browsing news items, but that's never the aim of the 'site'.

[jankratochvil]

interesting

[Loafboy]

I love it

Saves reading the papers

[dpaul999]

I think this is an interesting site, but it seems impractical for the average user.

[flashlorax]

as far as i can tell google does not produce an rss feed of its news site... i assume the data used in this flash was parsed from an xml file (it would be hell if it wasnt) so im wondering where this xml file comes from... doing a search i found a bunch of articles on a program developed (GNews2RSS) to create rss feeds from a google news query but google sent a cease and desist order so im wondering if there is a legal way to retrieve a feed from google news... if the data wasnt acquired via rss/xml could the developer explain from where it comes from and the parsing methods used? just curious. i dont represent google in any way so dont worry if u used an illegal method...i dont care.