Nicholas Felton

By Criswell Lappin, Design Director I held a man's life in my hands. It was red and blue with gold foil stamping. I was looking at the life of Gordon Felton, originally Gunter Fajgenbaum, as compiled by his son, information designer Nicholas Felton. For the last six years, Felton has generated the Feltron Annual Report, [...]

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Geoff McGhee has put together a remarkable documentary on the state of Data Visualization and more specifically its expanding role in the world of journalism. I was lucky enough to be given a few minutes of screen time to discuss my Annual Reports, but the film is a great opportunity to hear from most of [...]

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The Map Your Moves project mentioned in an earlier post came to a close recently, and the submissions have been posted on the WNYC website. Moritz Stefaner outdid himself and built an interactive tool for interrogating the data. His Map Your Moves exploration allows you to see every move and motivation throughout the decade of data. [...]

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The disuse of my f16 — f19 keys always makes them the first to get dusty, the visual opposite of the gloss I've worn onto my space bar and the scratched-off surface of my Wacom tablet. I love these little stories about computer habits, and signs of wear, trails, and artifacts of routine are some [...]

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Last month, I was fortunate to find a slot in Zach Lieberman's Summer session at SVA's MIxD department. Zach Lieberman is one of the creators of OpenFrameworks, an open source framework for programming all kinds of astounding interactive compositions. Zach's own projects are, in a word, magical, and by naming his course "Leaving the Screen," [...]

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I am a huge fan of crowdsourced data, which is why I'm excited about the data Brian Lehrer has been gathering at WNYC for the "Map Your Moves" project. Mr. Lehrer asked his listeners to report on where they've lived over the last ten years and why they moved. The dataset was recently made available [...]

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This is one of my favorite art pieces. It combines mucking about in the Thames with scientific processes, systems for collecting, and a presentation taxonomy. Mark Dion created it in preparation for the opening of the Tate Modern in London. Dion established a methodology for exploration … where to look, for how long, how deep [...]

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Familiarity can be a good thing to leverage. In the information design vernacular, displays like pie charts will always have a place. In the same way, topography is a great common concept to play with… which is why I thought this crime topography of San Francisco was so ingenious. In the same vein, I recently [...]

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Last Fall, I added a new application to my toolkit: I began using an application called Processing. The bad news is that it's a programming language. The good news is that anyone can start drawing shapes on screen in a few minutes, and given an hour or two of attention, you can start inventing and [...]

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A few years ago I made the transition from all-purpose graphic designer to information designer. I have no regrets about this decision, and frequently stumble upon signposts from my bookshelf or memory that support this choice. I think that there are amazing things being done in this field every day, but so much of my [...]

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