Brain Pickings

Gift Guide: Kids & The Eternal Kid

From thinking to tinkering, by way of color, music and photography.

This is Part 2 of the three-part Brain Pickings holiday gift guide. Today, we’re looking at goods and goodies for kids of all ages and the eternal kid in everyone.

HERE COMES SCIENCE

Indie rock icons They Might Be Giants are among the most revolutionary musicians of our time. Their critically acclaimed Here Comes Science children’s series lives up to their relentless thinking-in-all-kinds-of-directions innovation and consistent excellence. The 2-disc CD/DVD album is a bundle of creativity and entertainment, tied with a ribbon of education. Although aimed at the K-5 set, the playful lyrics and brilliantly animated videos are an absolute treat for musicologists and design junkies alike — we can attest.

We reviewed it in full, with trailers and more, here.

Perfect for: Musicologists, science lovers, those into creative and non-traditional education

FUJIFILM INSTAX MINI

Polaroid may have barely escaped the kiss of obsolescence, but instant film cameras will always hold immeasurable nostalgic charm in the digital age. The new Fujifilm Instax MINI offers a lovely twist on your dad’s old Land Cam, packaged in a gorgeously designed Mac-ish white body that’s just a joy to hold and look at. It prints credit-card-sized photos and, for those interested in the technical shenanigans, has a built-in flash, four exposure settings for indoor and outdoor shooting, and — our favorite — a wicked wide-angle lens that makes for some gorgeous, gorgeous shots. It’s a return to simpler times of no memory cards and USB cables and i-anything. But it gives you more creative control while still being a no-brainer to operate.

Sure, we love (love love) the design, but we’re even more taken with what it stands for — an analog connection to the fleeting moment, celebrating the essence of the presence in a way that preserves it for the future.

Perfect for: Budding photographers, creatively inclined kids, design aficionados, hopeless nostalgics, retro lovers

ABC3D

Who doesn’t love a good pop-up book? Marion Bataille‘s ABC3D takes the familiar genre it to a whole new level.

Slick, stylish and designerly, it’s hard to capture its tactile, interactive magic in static words — you have to have it in your hands to truly appreciate it.

We took a closer look, along with 4 more creative alphabet books, last week.

Perfect for: Designers and their kids, bookbinding geeks, paper craft lovers

PART OF IT

It’s never too early — or too late — to introduce the idea of the conscious consumer. And when it’s done with quirk and creativity, it’s bound to engage, inspire and, well, effect change. Enter Part Of It, a wonderful venture founded by illustrator duo Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Burns in 2007, working with artists to create products for causes they are passionate about.

From Helvetica alphabet t-shirts to a lovely tote bags, profits from these goodies benefit charities chosen by the artists. (Who, by the way, include Brain Pickings darling Adrian Johnson.)

Perfect for: The socially-conscious and design-driven

THE INDIE ROCK COLORING BOOK

Indie music defines itself through the colorful quirk of its artists and evangelists. Without that, it would blend in with the grey mediocrity of the mainstream. For the past two years, obscenely talented UK illustrator Andy J. Miller has been working on a project that celebrates this whimsy. Today, he finally releases the Indie Rock Coloring Book — a wonderful collection of hand-illustrated activity pages, mazes, connect-the-dots, and coloring pages for indie icons like Bloc Party, The Shins, Iron & Wine, Broken Social Scene, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, The New Pornographers, The National, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

We reviewed it in full, with trailers and more, here.

Perfect for: Indie music fans and their artistically inclined offspring

THE ELEMENTS

Photographer and all-around geek Theodor Gray spent 7 years gathering objects, from the fascinating to the mundane, that embody and exemplify the 118 elements in the periodic table. Then he shot them brilliantly, producing The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe — an utterly captivating exploration of the matter that we, and all the things around us, are made of.

Set to the first authorized video version of Tom Lehrer’s iconic eponymous song, The Elements video gives you a taste for what to expect from this gem of a book.

Perfect for: Neo-geeks, science junkies, photography lovers, visual learners

MAGNA TILES

We’re firm believers in the power of tinkering in developing creativity.

And there’s nothing more stimulating to the creative brain than playing with simple, flat shapes and basic colors to produce a near-infinite variety of 3D whimsy. Which is why we love this 100-piece set of clear-color magna tiles. Sure, kids will be all over it, but we dare you not to love it yourself.

Perfect for: Tinkerers, builders, color lovers, budding industrial designers

POOH’S COMEBACK

In 1926, English author Alan Alexander Milne took a shelf of his son’s stuffed toys and turned them into some of the best-loved books ever published — the Winnie-the-Pooh series was born. This year, 81 years after Christoper Robin and the gang left the Hundred Acre Wood, they are back for a new adventure.

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is among the most epic comebacks in English literature. Although Milne himself is long dead, the new book is written by David Benedictus — who also produced the audio adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh, starring Dame Judi Dench — and meticulously based on Milne’s Pooh stories, with artwork by Mark Burgess in the style of original illustrator E. H. Shepard.

We reviewed it in full here.

Perfect for: Readers, nostalgics, Pooh lovers of all ages

LEGO ARCHITECTURE

We love LEGO — who doesn’t? And what better way to learn about the man-made hallmarks of our civilization than by building them with your bare hands?

No, you won’t be lugging mastabas across the Egyptian desert — we’re talking about the LEGO Architecture Series. From the Taj Mahal to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, you — or your little one — can get down and dirty with humanity’s greatest architectural achievements.

Perfect for: Tinkerers, builders, architecture lovers

CRAYOLA EXECUTIVE PEN

Ah, Crayola. Easily one of the most beloved brands of all time. Even just saying the name evokes that distinct, wonderful smell of your first crayon.

Now, you can resurrect your inner kid with a lovely, desk-job-safe Crayola Executive Pen, in orange, green, violet and yellow. Need we say more?

Perfect for: Everyone!

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

The Interpretation

Combining microbiology, minimalist music, and motion graphics, or how you can own original art for less than the price of a movie ticket.

No longer the sole domain of the leisured classes, art collecting is open to broad audiences like never before. Over the last few years, online marketplaces — like 20×200 and Supermarket — have made works on paper readily accessible.

Somehow, though, this great democratization of patronage seems to have skipped over digital art as a medium for popular purchase. We find this kind of amusing, given that new media creations are the consummate works of art for the age of digitized reproduction. It’s precisely creations made for screens that best lend themselves to mass duplication and distribution.

(Perhaps we consider computers too utilitarian a medium for something as utopian as art; or, more likely, no online dealer has yet established itself as the go-to purveyor. If anyone wants to partner up for that project, we’re game…)

One example of such easily collected work is The Interpretation, a 36-minute DVD that was an official selection of the DOTMOV Film Festival, The Graphic Design Festival, and TodaysArt Digital Art Festival. Created by Michael Paul Young and Michael Cina, co-founders of the Minneapolis-based design firm YouWorkForThem, The Interpretation takes you on an abstract tour through a verdant environment composed entirely of vectors. Green, blue, and brown shapes hint at both seascapes and plant forms. Swirling planes of color take on the dimensions of tornadoes and turbines, turning infinitely around some locus that remains forever hidden.

A soundtrack composed by Cina in collaboration with recording label Ghostly International combines barking dogs, bird chirps, and blowing wind, manipulated from online samples and mashed up into an enigmatic, textured minimalism.

As with an actual forest, we find The Interpretation calming and foreboding in equal measure; it’s almost as though our remove from nature is now so vast, even its virtual incarnation can feel overwhelming. (For more superb works for screen, check out Young’s Vimeo page and iPhone art app, Buamai.)

Young created the work’s visuals first, initially as a commission for the OFFF digital art festival. Originally intended to be installed in a small room with monitors covering the walls, The Interpretation would create an ambient world for contemplation. What’s so cool about the work, though — and the reason we hope new media art finds a larger following — is that you can experience it in a range of settings. Unlike media that can only be in one place at a time, digital work is often created for infinite destinations.

So even if you’re reading this at work, you can dim the lights, press play, and take in an interpretation of nature, rendered by code.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Interview with Dava Viz Star Pedro Monteiro

Why data viz must have a prominent seat at the newsroom table, or how the Internet is increasing the need for aesthetics.

Today, we’re picking the brains of Portuguese data viz maestro Pedro Monteiro, whose work on Whatype and Visualisation Magazine makes him one of the most exciting champions of today’s emerging data visualization culture.

Hey Pedro, good to have you. Tell us a bit about yourself, your background and your brand of curiosity.

Thanks for having me.

I’m a graphic designer from Portugal. I work on VISÃO, a weekly newsmagazine, as a designer and a “consultant” for visual information. I’m also a consultant for INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group. I’m self-taught in design, having studied mathematics in college. What fascinates me in design is the communication with people and the different storytelling techniques you can use to craft the best “tone.”

When and how did you first get into information visualization?

I was studying typographic grids to use in VISÃO and I discovered the work of [iconic Swiss designer] Karl Gerstner. It was amazing! I went on to understand the making of his Complex Grid (still the most popular post on Whatype) and bought his book, Designing Programmes.

I guess it was my math side, but the idea of approaching a design problem by making a list of all the complexities and then find solutions for each — all done in theory before starting the design — really appealed to me.

This kind of thinking made much sense to me and I started playing with it. Eventually, I applied this in a series I was working on for Whatype about the Kyoto Protocol.

I went on a web search and started finding a great deal of incredible work. Not only was it beautiful, but most importantly, it told stories, all by data and numbers. In a way, I could say that information visualization built the bridge between my education and my practice.

Sustainability seems to be a running undercurrent in a lot of your work. How do you see designers and visual artists becoming change agents in the issues they care about?

I believe that good design is good communication, finding the best way to communicate an idea or a concept. This allows designers to take a huge part in making change happen in the world.

Just see what IDEO is doing with their design thinking approach. The work that Stefanie Posavec did with Kerouac’s On The Road, it changes the world and the way people look at it. Look at Hans Rosling’s TED talks, they are changing much of what people used to believe and think.

That’s some of the appeal that data visualization has for me — being able to show something, to tell a story that is hidden in raw data.

How did the idea for Visualisation Magazine first come up? What is the project ultimately trying to achieve, besides offering a wonderful selection of visual candy?

The original idea is not mine. Chris Watson created the magazine for his site, Visual Think Map. When I joined his site, I offered my services to redesign the original magazine.

I wanted to make something that was “transparent” enough not to “cover” the incredible works that the magazine was presenting. In a way, this was a very Swiss approach. Chris was kind enough to let me on board and we’ve collaborated to produce the present product.

Truth be told, most of the hard work on Visualisation Magazine is upon Chris’s shoulders and he is doing a great job.

The project aims to introduce a broader audience to the world of visualization. And, hopefully, inspire and invite even more people to join this area of expertise. The magazine is also trying to create an archive of great work, cataloging it by visualization type. Each volume is about a specific technique or way of displaying information, making it a good reference book for designers.

We’re very big on the concept of curated content here — we’ve noticed that each issue of the magazine is curated by a different beacon of visualization. And in a way, every data viz artist is a curator when choosing which information to use, culling the relevant data from the noise. What role do you see curators playing in bringing data visualization to the masses and helping us make sense of the increasing amount of information out there?

I agree with the notion that a data viz artist is a curator when working on the data and choosing the best graphic way to reveal the story within. In that sense, this curatory role is of great importance.

Data visualization is going to play an incredibly important role in our lives — like you said, there is an amount of data surrounding us today that is incomprehensible without the proper techniques to “look” inside it.

There is so much to be learned and our world, our lives need this knowledge. Some great projects — like Tracing the Visitor’s Eye — have demonstrated this.

For me, working in journalism, there is also a lot that can be taken from data visualization. Journalists have always been curators, diving into the metaphorical sea to find the stories that would be important and of interest to the public. Today, with the Internet and the easy access to information by the public, journalists’ role must again be that of curators, but the “sea” has changed.

What we need today are richer explanations of the news — we need a 360º view of the major events that are happening. Having knowledge of data viz inside a newsroom can provide news with more profound information. There are great stories inside all the data available today.

For Visualisation Magazine, the curators are very important in offering a different view of data viz, different views from Chris’s or mine. A curator also gives the project a special quality stamp, achieving an openness to the community. It’s a magazine about the data viz community, by the community and to the community and beyond.

Thanks for letting us pick your brains, Pedro. Any last thoughts left unpicked?

I’d like to just say that with data visualization becoming more open to the general public comes a bigger challenge of getting the community to look at each other’s work, find the value in it and discuss its shortcommings in a constructive way.

I agree with Robert Kosara when he says that we need to built a sense of data viz criticism. We must be able to criticize the works made public, but without making the mistaken assumption that most of the data viz knowledge is already cemented and that there are no new ways of having different approaches.

Manuel Lima’s Information Visualization Manifesto — even if I don’t agree with every little part of it — is a great effort in achieving this.

My guess is that one must be as concerned about the data being shown as with the intention of telling its story. Sometimes, it takes a certain degree of aesthetics in order to draw the audience into your story. Other times, you need to keep away from aesthetic approaches for the best result.

We must be able to be open-minded about data viz techniques and experiences in order to keep this field growing quickly as it must, making it a field that welcomes newcomers with new and fresh voices and views.

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.