I use a pen instead of computer when I write in my journal, sign stuff, write thank you and personal notes, capture reminders on a sticky and make a list. It doesn’t take much for my hand to cramp when entering longer journal entries. The left hand tires easily when writing and I type fast. So why would I rely on a pen or pencil for coming up with ideas for articles and blog posts?

Photo by sxc.hu user mzacha

Brainstorming with a keyboard just doesn’t work as well as with pen and paper. Not even when using brainstorming and mind mapping apps. It takes a different type of effort to enter information and draw shapes. This  interferes with the brainstorming process making it feel forced and tedious.

By accident, I discovered a better way. A bunch of ideas hit me while I worked on my laptop in bed. Rather than let risk losing those thoughts, I pulled out the pad stored in the drawer next to my bedside for easy access. I also grabbed a specific right pen instead of the first one available. I had a specific pen that I love to use for special writing with its soft point that glides without teeny bumps as my left hand made circles, dots, crosses, curves, lines.

The brain and hand ran wild bringing more ideas than I had initially. Bullets, circles, notes. No criticizing allowed. Within 15 to 20 minutes, I had enough notes for 25 articles and posts.

I’ve had a pen and pad next to my bed for years. Why did it take this long to realize the benefits of hand mind mapping? Whenever I jotted anything down, it was only an idea or two and then I went back to sleep or resuming whatever I was doing. This time I had a mountain of ideas that grew from there as I continued writing.

So why does opening a document and typing everything that comes to mind not work as well as pen and paper? Even mind mapping and graphing software fails me. Using software merely produces a few notes between a lot of long pauses.

Daphne Gray-Grant gives me the answer in her excellent Power Writing newsletter. She says it’s a left and right brain thing. The right side is the creative side. Using a pen and paper gets the right side’s motor running allowing thoughts to pour out easily and quickly. The act of typing and using the mouse slow creativity.

This doesn’t mean that mind mapping software has no place in the brainstorming process. They work for many people.

I’m a lefty, so the right hemisphere of the brain dominates. You’d think this advantage would make up for using the keyboard. It doesn’t. I love using technology and gadgets, but sometimes the brain needs extra help and that means switching to pen and paper.

If you’ve struggled with mind mapping or brainstorming or find you can’t get much out of a typed outline, go the pen and paper route and see what happens.

How do you come up with story ideas?

Thanks to the 007 of Dashboards (Dashboard Spy) for creating the 175 The Ultimate List logo. You’re welcome to steal the logo.

175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources post is the inspiration for the logo.

Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte‘s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action.

It’s not just about presenting data in a presentation or making things colorful. Infovis also helps us find and understand things quicker With the growing implementation of electronic dashboards, we need to learn how to create effective visual representations of data to make the most of dashboard technology. Here’s an infographic about useless infographics

It’s a struggle for me as I haven’t practiced this process or created any charts in a long time. Here are examples and resources for inspiration and learning.

Updated: 9 July 2010

ShortURL to this post: http://bit.ly/yz7to

Examples

1. 5 Amazing Infographics for the Health Conscious
2. 10 Outstanding Social Media Graphics
3. 10 Revealing Infographics about the Web
4. 10×10 is “100 words and pictures that define time.”
5. 15 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain
6. 35 Great Social Media Infographics
7. 3D Animation of Linux Code Development
8. 7 Nights of Bright Eyes article and accompanying visual analysis of Conor Oberst.
9. 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization
10. AInews.org: Note the .org! Use the other and you’ll get an R-rated surprise. Simple news headlines appears in different sizes. Mouse over a headline for a summary or click the + to save it (up to 10).
11. AntarcticAnimation: “Reveals the profound human connections that some have made with Antarctica’s changing landscape.” Animations and map.
12. Archival Maps from Library of Congress
13. Atlas of Cyberspaces “is atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces.”
14. BabyNameVoyager byMartin Wattenberg.
15. Baseball Teams: Salary vs. Performance [Link: Lauren's Blog]
16. Ben Fry’s archive of past work at MIT that blended computer science, graphical design, and data visualization. Zipdecode shows how zip code numbering works and Salary vs. Performance looks at baseball teams and spending. Learn how to do these with Fry’s book, Processing: A Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists.
17. Books That Make You Dumb: Of course, reading them won’t lower your IQ — little humor, y’know? This chart comes from data based on books read in college and comparing that to SAT scores. The higher a book scores, the smarter it is.
18. Business Planet interactive map that shows how hard or easy it is to do business in many economies.
19. Candidate Match Game: Very cool tool from USA Today that’s not a game, but more a tool to help you see which candidates share your opinions on big issues. It’s the chart that appears after you complete the questions that amazes.
20. Cartifact interactive maps and animations. Explore the company’s site for more examples (commercial).
21. Charteo.us: Uses charts to track book sales rankings. More charts coming.
22. Chris Harrison’s Projects Page: Man, this is incredible. It includes Visualizing the Bible, which visualizes cross-references in the Bible and others I’ve already mentioned in here before finding this.
23. CityVisions: Maps of cities
24. Civilization Maps video
25. Corporate Connection
26. Dashboard By Example has examples of actual business dashboards that started as part of the Dashboard Spy. Also, Dashboard Spy’s Big List of Experts, Dashboard.TV (videos), and Dashboard By Example. Busy spy!
27. Data360: Maps and charts of issues ranging from local and international to arts and business.
28. Data Visualization of a Social Network is the result of a school project.
29. A Day in the Life of The Colour Economy
30. Death and Taxes 2008: See where your federal tax dollars are heading.
31. Digg Labs using visualization for managing the latest news.
32. Dream Ether: Create a dream or see other dreams and other experiments.
33. Duarte Design work examples (commercial). Nancy Duarte is the author of slide:ology.
34. The Dumpster is a visualization of romantic breakups.
35. Ear Studio timeline.
36. Etsy takes a creative approach in helping people find products with tools such as the Time Machine and Geolocator.
37. Felton Annual Report 2005, 2006, and 2007
38. Flickrvision
39. FlowingData and its archives have many visualization examples.
40. Formwerks, architectual firm using infovis on its site. Not sure this is effective as it may be difficult for prospects to figure out.
41. Geopictorial Maps (commercial)
42. GMap: Drawing graphics as maps includes maps of trade relations and book maps.
43. Goldstar Beer Flow Chart Ads: One, two, three – sexist or not, admit it’s creative.
44. Good Magazine’s Transparency is a “graphical exploration of the data that surrounds us.”
45. Google Chrome overview by Scott McCloud.
46. Google Maps: Now you can see buildings up close in Street View. Wow. That took a heck of a lot of time to do.
47. Google Trends: Charts based on entered search words.
48. Grokker: Dynamic search.
49. HCIL Visualization houses past and present visualizations projects.
50. Historic Cities contains maps relating to past, present and future of historic cities.
51. Brief History of Visual Aids
    HistoryShots information graphics prints for sale, but it’s an experience to look at each one and read about them (commercial).
52. Human Flows visually and interactively maps global migrations.
53. Idea Line by Martin Wattenberg
54. Idea Mapping Success: Book idea maps
55. If You Printed Twitter…
56. InfoGraphics: Four Ways of Looking at Twitter: Use of TwitterVenn and other apps.
57. Internet Memes provides an interactive timeline along with a description of each meme.
58. Imagini: Find your visual DNA.
59. John Grimwade‘s index of diagrams and maps.
60. Jon’s Excel and Charting Pages contains many examples of using Excel for charts.
61. Jorge Camoes’ Charts
62. Juice Analytics’ writings includes many visualization examples. Check out the apps and tools especially the Chart Chooser. They recreated the NY Times Cancer chart.
63. knowledge-communication.org gallery contains visuals for faciliating knowledge communications between experts and decision makers.
64. LinuxDistribution Timeline
65. LivesConnected through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
66. Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Infographics: Don’t let the title throw you. Lots of great stuff.
67. Many Eyes from IBM contains many visualizations.
68. MapEcos: Map of US facilities with information on pollution and improvement efforts.
69. Mark Lombardi works: An abstract artist who researched scandals.
70. Martin Wattenberg research projects list includes History Wired is a visual exploration of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s holdings that seeks to reproduce the serendipity experienced when browsing in a physical museum, History Flow, QuerySketch, and Map of the Market.
71. Materials Research Center Interactive Directory
72. MedMaps: MindMaps for doctors and medical students.
73. MindMap Library: Collection of 1000s of mindmaps.
74. MindMapPedia: Collection of mindmaps that welcomes submissions.
75. mindServe Group: Example diagrams and templates (commercial)
76. MyMap e-mail relational map.
77. MySociety Travel Time Maps and other projects. Comments on travel time maps from co-creator Tom Carden.
78. Newsmap
79. Nigel Holmes Explanation Graphics charts, diagrams , and motion graphics.
80. Panorama-Maps
81. Perceptual Edge has examples of turning data into visual information and before and after examples to show how to better tell the story behind the data. Participants in its forums discuss good and bad examples.
82. Places and Spaces: Mapping science.
83. Prefuse Gallery
84. Processing examples including Inequality of CEO salaries.
85. R Graph Gallery shows graphs created with programming environment R.
86. RoomforMilk: “Fresh skimmed Slashdot headlines.”
87. Sesame Street on visual thinking. An old video teaching visualizing shapes.
88. Small Business Blogging Map: Get the big picture on how blogging helps small businesses gain more customers.
89. Social Networks around the World: Which social network does your country use the most?
90. Starbucks and McDonalds Infographic: See how the two franchises are taking over the world… close to it.
91. Stef Crowley portfolio and cool video of her creating a historical timeline for the University of Buffalo (commercial).
92. The Story of Stuff (commercial)
93. Swivel: Explore, share and upload data. Check out the Swivel Bar for Excel.
94. Tell Me a Story provides tips on telling stories through presentations.
95. They Rule lets you “create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.”
96. TopicScape Mindmaps Directory
97. TouchGraph Google Browser explores connections between related Web sites. Also available: TouchGraph Amazon and TouchGraph Facebook.
98. Tracking the threat looks at data relating to terrorism.
99. Twittervision, TwitterMap, TwitterSearch
100. Understanding USA by Richard Saul Wurman
101. US Demographics Visualizer: Filter and use color codes to review US census data by population, age, ethnicity, political, and income.
102. Usenet Newsgroups hierarchies treemap
103. The Virus Lab: Get your own Social Virus
104. VisualComplexity looks at visualization of complex networks. It also has a wealth of related links.
105. Visual Dictionary Online
106. Visual Insight murals that illustrate information.
107. Visual Literacy, an e-learning course, has maps and demos.
108. Visual Think Map’s Photostream: Flickr page of visual maps.
109. Visuwords online graphical dictionary and thesaurus
110. Washington DC Metro Maps helped me get around Washington, DC for six years. The hardest part was figuring out the end of the route so I could ensure I got on the right train.
111. We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotions in six movements.
112. Wikipedia visualizations: Clusterball, WikiViz, First Monday, A Beautiful WWW, and Wikipedia Top 50.
113. WikipediaVision shows anonymous edits in realtime.
114. Wikipedia Diagrams, Drawings, and Maps page and this shows the definition of Pi.
115. Winner of the personal visualization project as well as other entries.
116. WorldMapper has over 366 maps for exploring.
117. WorldProcessor uses globes to show distribution of different world parameters.
118. You Are Not Alone Here and other projects by Steven Baughman and Michael Tabtabai

Blogs

1. Beyond Bullet Points Blog covers ways to use media to communicate. Author Cliff Atkinson’s Sociable Media has more resouces.
2. BldgBlog focuses on architecture, but talks a lot about great visuals and illustrations.
3. The Center for Graphic Facilitation
4. CommonCraft: Folks behind the great presentations that explain stuff like RSS and Wikis.
5. Cool Infographics has a collection of many amazing posters.
6. Creating Passionate Users uses many nice visual images in its entries as support.
7. David Sibbet discusses visualization and graphic facilitation.
8. Dataisnature
9. Data Mining: Text mining, visualization, and social media has a neat map of the blogosphere.
10. Digital Roam blog by The Back of the Napkin author David Roam — about solving problems with pictures — check out the presentation on the book’s site. Two maps from the book.
11. EagerEyes
12. emo+beer = busted career … seriously, it has visualizations.
13. Forest and the Trees: Flash and data visualization
14. Found in Translation
15. Future Feeder: Discusses impact of information and computation on architecture.
16. Idea Mapping by the author of Idea Mapping, Jamie Nast
17. Indexed : “This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”
18. InfoDesign
19. Information Design Watch
20. Information Is Beautiful: Indeed.
21. Infographics News
22. Information Aesthetics: Data visualization and visual communication.
23. Information Visualization
24. JunkCharts: Blog dedicated to recycling bad charts into junk art.
25. Karl Gude
26. The Mind Mapping Software Weblog
27. Mindserve Clipper
28. Neoformix
29. Networked Performance on Visualization
30. NiXLOG Infographics
31. Nooface: Searching for the post-PC interface
32. Point by Fascinating Point
33. ProcessingBlogs and ProcessingHacks: Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound.
34. Random Etc.
35. Serial Consign on Infographics
36. Strange Maps
37. Street Anatomy is a blog on medical visualization.
38. Tableau Software on data visualization.
39. The Underlying Blog
40. Peace of Mind
41. Visual Business Intelligence by Stephen Few
42. Visual Linguists is a blog by Neil Cohn on visual language of comics.
43. Visual Methods
44. VisualSpeak Blog
45. Visual Thinking School
46. VizThink Blog
47. Writing on the Walls by Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas co-author Christine Valenza

If a blog isn’t listed — it may be too new, hasn’t been updated in a long time, doesn’t have enough entries. Of course, I may have simply missed it. Please add it in comments or email me.

Resources

1. 37 People You Should Follow for Infographics on Twitter
2. 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to Help You Make Excel Magic is a list similar to this one with a focus on Excel.
3. 70+ PowerPoint Presentation Resources would benefit from these resources and you can see how some people used infovis in their presentations.
4. Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards: How to include data visualization as an important part of a web site not as a lone figure or chart.
5. Alltop Infographics page: You know how Alltop operates. Blogs covering the topic all in one page.
6. The Art of Visual Thinking: Guy Kawasaki shares a drawing of his own based on Alltop.
7. Beyond Bullet Points teaches how to tell a story with PowerPoint without resorting to useless templates. Think of it as presentation turned into visuals.
8. Bob Horn is an expert on visual argumentation mapping and his site posts speeches, articles, and examples including the cool home page.
9. Communicating Concepts through Comics: Presentation
10. Data Visualization: Modern Approaches from Smashing Magazine has tons of examples, articles, tools, and resources.
11. Dataesthetics: Power and Beauty of Data Visualization by Eric Blue who has more entries on infovis, visualization, and mindmap.
12. Dave Gray Info
13. Drawing Together Online: Presentation
14. Edward Tufte site has forums, examples, articles, and more.
15. ExcelUser has articles on plotting with Excel such as Comparing Metrics by Category and tips for dashboarding with Excel.
16. Gapminder is a non-profit organization that uses data visualization to get its message across. Hans Rosling, co-founder of the organization, turns boring numbers into animation to help us make sense of the world especially in Gapminder World.
17. generator.x : Examines role of software and generative strategies in art and design. Associated blog.
18. GTD for Mindmanager: Getthing Things Done on Mindmanager, software for
19. History of Cartography tutorials
20. How to Create MindMaps with Mindomo
21. InfoVis Wiki
22. Inf@Vis! InfoVis.net Digital Magazine
23. InstantAtlas: Software for visually analyzing statistical data. Examples.
24. Introduction to Sketchcasting, a way to combine podcasting with sketching. Arclabs has other experiments and resources of interest.
25. An Introduction to Visual Thinking: Presentation
26. Jerry Isdale’s Big List of Infovis Links. Just like it sounds.
27. John Grimwade Information Graphics has cool diagrams and maps.
28. Logic+Emotion: Visual Thinking Archive: Presentation
29. Mapping History with art and images
30. Mapstraction: “Library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible.
31. Map Your Mind: Mindmapping resource.
32. Mentegrafica is a blog by Daniele Galiffa on information visualization. His site also has infovis projects and presentations posted.
33. OLIVE: Online library of visualization environments.
34. Online Schools: Education made fun with info graphics.
35. Periodic Table of Visualization Methods: Very cool interactive table.
36. Pictorial Maps from Wikipedia
37. ProcessTrends covers Data Analysis and Visualization with Excel Tools and Charts.
38. Proximity Graphs is a tool that connects actors based on movies and authors by papers in computer science journals.
39. RadicalCartography: Does map visualizations and also includes resources. Click the menu items to see samples.
40. Rico Clusters: An Alternative to Mind Mapping
41. Sketchcasting = podcasting + doodling
42. SPSS Viz Designer: Software that provides visual clarity to predictive analytics analysis.
43. Squidoo page on Visual Maps
44. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design): Provides visualization as an option for viewing the information.
45. TextArc: Visual representation of text.
46. Toxi: Interactive works include base26 (all four-letter words in English)
47. Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies
48. Twine’s Visualization topic
49. UNO (UNiversal Organizer): Mind mapping tool. No software. Just plain paper.
50. Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka: Presentation
51. The Visual Dictionary serves as an academic resource where images replace words.
52. Visual Editors “is the online classroom and meeting hall where student and working journalists from newsrooms around the world come to study the latest reporting, editing and design techniques, story forms, media trends, and interactive strategies.”
53. Visual Literacy: eLearning tutorial on visualization that also has a periodic table of visualization methods in its maps section.
54. Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design [pdf file]: Booklet with a basic introduction to information design for non-governmental and advocacy organizations.
55. Visual Thinking Squidoo page by Xplane’s Dave Gray. And his Visual Thinking Art.
56. VizThink: Conference focused on visual thinking.
57. Walk2We: Visualizes connections between web sites.
58. We Make Money Not Art on visualizing
59. What Ordinary People Need Most from Information Visualization Today [pdf file] by Stephen Few.
60. York University Gallery of Data Visualization shows contains many resources, data visualization timeline, and examples.