Friday Vid Picks: High Design

I’m a sucker for the design section of the magazine rack — everything from ID to Communication Arts, Eye to Wallpaper. I’ve read all but the latest from Edward Tufte in a somewhat fruitless effort to hold up my own end of high level information architecture and graphic design conversations. Sigh — I’ll have to settle for posting clips from YouTube by people who can.

Some people wanted to be rock stars when they grew up — I wanted to work for The Designers Republic. Here’s their tribue to abstract painter Victor Vasarely.

Martin Källström of Twingly wrote in to show us a real-time blog activity visualization tool developed by two students, Linus and Malin, working on their master’s thesis while at the company. Windows users can download this very, very pretty screensaver to gaze at and play with to their heart’s delight.

“The Machine is Us/ing Us” from professor Mike Wesch of Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography department was a huge hit last week. This is a great example of design as a visual vehicle for communcating complex ideas.

Another example is this “Visualization of DNA Replication. It’s like being in a molecular biology class and at a rave at the same time. I have no idea where this is from or who created it beyond what’s on YouTube, but damn if it isn’t mesmerizing.

Putting the ‘pop’ in ‘pop art,’ Steve Bryant dug up this music video for “Remind Me” from Norway’s Royskopp. Check out his post on Reel Pop for even more infographic videos — which I’ll admit helped to inspire this collection. But then, theft is one of a designer’s best tools.