I haven’t talked much about my Information Visualization course with Ben Fry and Golan Levin. They are quite an amusing pair, a mix of design and art and nerdery.

Today we had our first crit, which only involved select projects. Mine was not one of them. And thank goodness for that, because it was dreadful.

We had to create either a map or a time series. We could use processing or not. We had no limits on data, except we could not use the stock market or the weather.

I had a couple ideas, and tried using processing for both. But I got tripped up on syntax in both cases. I thought my ActionScript skills would translate to processing because processing is layered upon Java, and Java is similar to ActionScript. I was 90 percent correct.

With a looming deadline, I ditched processing and did something in AfterEffects (of all things), and I’m not really sure if it was a map or a time series. After some reflection, I think it was just me floundering.

At any rate, my peers produced some sweet stuff. Definitely inspiring.

Before class and seeing what others had done, I told Golan and Ben I would do mine over. Seeing my peers work provided further fodder for that. To add even more incentive, I commit to posting my redo here.