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I read the news yesterday that Eoin Colfer will be writing another installment of the 5-volume Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy trilogy. This set off alarm bells in my head, even though the project is going ahead with the full blessing of Douglas Adams’ widow, Jane. I am assured by friends who know Jane personally, that this is not a cynical money-making ploy, but is being done “for the fans”. Even though that may be the case, as a long-time avid reader of Douglas’ books, I remain to be convinced that the project is a good idea.

Adams’ writing style was unique and ground-breaking. Even the proposed new author admits he’s terrified at the prospect of following in the great man’s footsteps! This doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence for the outcome.

With many things in life, re-visiting old haunts many years down the line can be a mixed blessing. How many times have you returned to a location much-loved from your childhood, only to find that things have changed beyond all recognition? You can end up wishing you had left well alone.

If this is true of physical places, then we enter a whole new dimension when it comes to the subjective things like art, music and literature. I recently redisovered some 80’s music which I’d almost forgotten. Thankfully, it had lost nothing of it’s shine on hearing it again.  But these were songs by the original artists.

I’m often repelled by modern cover versions of classic songs, and can be heard yelling at the TV or radio that said tune has been murdered. But not always. I prefer Madonna’s version of American Pie, and almost any cover of a Bob Dylan song, over the original!

I also enjoyed the 2005 film of the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide, maybe even a bit more than (with hindsight) the slightly cheesy original TV series. Although made after Douglas’ untimely death, the film was something he had been pursuing for years, trying to find a studio in Hollywood which would remain faithful to the original characters, and live up to his own high standards.

So this brings me back to the Hitch-Hikers’ new installment, “And Another Thing…” Why resurrect the characters now? Not all the fans have been wondering what happened to Ford, Arthur, Zaphod and the others after all this time. I believed that Douglas hadn’t particularly left any unfinished business with the series.

Part of me wants the thing to be a success. But part of me is also dead worried that the new book won’t live up to my expectations. So, best case scenario: I read the new book and love it. Worst case: I read the new book and am left disappointed. It’s a gamble I’ll have to weight up when the tome hits the shelves next autumn. The trouble is, you can’t “un-read” a book once you’ve seen it.

Designing Our Way Through Data

Jeff Veen

Jeff’s opening keynote for @media was very thought provoking, as usual.

He spoke about data visualisation and how diagrams can often show us things more quickly and more intuitively than a table of data is able to.

User Participation + Mass of data = designing for data
Data + metadata = information

Make the data useable, you can make sense of it. Add some styles -> makes it more accessible. Example was a rainfall chart. Boring table gives no indication, you have to parse the figures and work it out. But make an icon in each cell instead – colour darker and a bigger raindrop for indicating more rainfall – suddenly the visualisation makes things easily understood. Beware, “prettification” can go too far, and destroy the underlying data.

Jeff also showed us some notable examples:

John Snow
A Cholera outbreak in 1854 in London killed 500 people in one neighbourhood. He figured out with empirical evidence what was happening by plotting the death locations on a map. The local water pump was infecting people  – pump handle removed -> people stopped dying. He effectively mashed up pump location vs Cholera deaths and proved Cholera was a water-born disease. Lead to the development of  Victorian sewers. Found new way of gaining meaning from data.

Charles Joseph Minard
Map and chart for Napoleon’s troops marching to Moscow [see above]. This showed graphically how the number of Napoleon’s troops dimished with time, and location, as they marched to Moscow. And it also showed vividly that thousands of them died whilst trying to cross a particular river – obviously a dangerous spot – by plotting time/deaths/geographical location, it tells you much more about the data than pure figures would convey. Minard said of his map:

The aim of my carte figurative is … to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calcuation. Charles Joseph Minard

Harry Beck
Tube map designer – Veen showed us before and after views. The old version was very confusing. Leaving out all the dross made things a lot simpler and more intuitive.

Google Analytics
Simplified things. Don’t plot too many things at once. Inspired by Indiana Jones plane journey – dot per datum on the chart. Don’t junk up things too much – remove “chart junk” and things get more comprehesible.

When to talk to people
Lots at the beginning, tails off in a log graph – compared with cost of changing your mind – the opposite. As launch approaches, expense climbs dramatically.

• Look at history
• Look at data visualisations
• Look at users

To help give instpiration for your designs. Books – Edward Tufte:  “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

Jeff’s presentation: slides (pdf) | audio (mp3)

There was a dangerously-tempting bookstall at d.Construct the other week, and I found myself buying two books which have been on my To Be Read list for a while:

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX – Christian Heilmann, Apress
I think it will be an excellent companion for the DOM Scripting book I’ve already read by Jeremy Keith. Will do a proper review when I’ve read this in more depth.

Blog Design Solutions – Andy Budd et al, Friends of ED
Great advice for customising your blog. Not just in terms of look and feel, but also advice on hosting your own blog, setting up testing environments, databases etc. I hope to give this blog a “lick of paint” in the near future!

I’ve also recently finished Dan Cederholm’s excellent book:
Bulletproof Web Design – Dan Cederholm, New Riders
This one is a must-read for anybody seriously contemplating standards-based web design. Dan takes common table-based solutions (which can still be seen in the wild), explains why they are not bulletproof, and then reworks the solution in a standards-based way. I was very impressed with the session he did for @media in June, and this takes things even further. A great reference for bulletproof techniques.