Mark Forscher Blog

11/4

11/05/08 by mark in design, politics. No Comments »

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like… People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” -Steve Jobs, 2003 in the New York Times. [via flowing data]

11/03/08 by mark in design, process. No Comments »

Audio-generated Landscapes

Audio-generated landscape from flight404 on Vimeo. More info on using Processing to create landscapes from FFT waveform data is here.

11/02/08 by mark in art, data visualization, design, video. No Comments »

Synchronized Presidential Debating

Say talking point and repeat. Masterfully edited. [via]

10/31/08 by mark in politics, video. 1 Comment »

New Job

newsweek

Just a quick post to announce that I recently became the creative director for Newsweek Digital. The position comes with its share of challenges but I’m really excited to improve the site experience and to build a strong design team here in nyc.

10/22/08 by mark in design, misc. No Comments »

Genres of Hit Songs from the 50s

Very Small Array posts several great data visualizations of info on hit songs in the United States. The one above is an interesting data visualization of the genres of hit songs from the 50s. I love the simplicity here. It’s really easy to read the data, note the shift in hits from vocal pop to rock and roll and r&b around 1955, and the result is still visually compelling.

09/29/08 by mark in data visualization, design. No Comments »

Other Things I’d Like to Delay

I can’t say that I laughed at any of these, but http://www.otherthingsidliketodelay.com/ gets points for simplicity and timeliness.

The context: earlier this week, McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and he would like to delay Friday’s presidential debate in order to focus on the financial crisis.

Wednesday, McCain also cancelled his appearance on Letterman, supposedly to go back to Washington to work on getting the $700 billion bailout bill passed. But instead, McCain did an interview with Katie Couric. Letterman found out McCain lied to him and played live video from the interview with Couric as it was happening.

The clip below of Letterman’s reaction to it all is incredible. This will definitely be one the key turning points in the campaign when we look back forty days from now:

I’m looking forward to the debate tonight with or without McCain’s appearance.

09/26/08 by mark in politics, web. No Comments »

Google In Quotes

Google’s In Quotes recently launched. The site allows users to cycle between quotes from 20 politicians on an array of issues. The interface promotes a head to head style comparison of quotes from two politicians on the same issue. Above is a screenshot of McCain versus McCain on the economy.

While the UI is fairly intuitive, the limitation of the project’s implementation is the content and the lack of an API. I know the election is coming up, but why am I limited to quotes from twenty politicians when services like Daylife pull timely quotes from everything that’s newsworthy? And why are there only a handful of quotes on these major policy issues from the candidates?

I guess this works as a proof of concept, but it’s not very useful until there’s a lot more content surfaced and it’s opened up with an API.

09/25/08 by mark in politics, web. 1 Comment »

Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! Email Hacked

Like many Bush administration officials, Sarah Palin used private email addresses for public communications, potentially to avoid document release requests. In her case, she used the addresses gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com.

Well today an anonymous poster claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin’s email account. Here’s a timeline of the incident. Supposedly there are screenshots of the inbox on wikileaks but the url isn’t loading for me.

While the hack and invasion of privacy is obviously not commendable, this incident highlights the gaping security hole and dangers of public officials using private email addresses for official communication.

09/17/08 by mark in politics, web. 1 Comment »