Awful. So we get some nicer planes on UAL from CO (738s, in seat-power in Economy Plus). But the UAL web site looked at least half-decent.

My quick sense is that they’ve imported a lot of elements from the CO site, and it looks awful, IMHO, at least compared to the old UAL site.

How many different typefaces have been jammed onto this page? And images? Even the word “United” appears in FOUR different typefaces.

Screenshot below (click to open up thumbnail), with my personal details blocked out:

Perhaps the most garish web site I visit, the Sydney Morning Herald. I like their iPad app, but this has long been awful and could be getting worse.

Screen-grab, click for PNG in new window:

Latest bunch of Futura-laden design and hold-in-your-hands goodness…from the Field Notes gang at Coudal. Clickable thumbnails below…

With Lynn Vavreck at UCLA, I ran parallel public opinion surveys in Australia and the United States, measuring attitudes on security, the fight against terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan etc, some 10 years after the 9/11 attacks.

Full report here (generated with Sweave, xelatex, etc).

I can’t resist this stuff.

And the new, new post-merger United logo has been on the company’s web site for a while now, and is starting to appear on fleet livery as well.

It looks way better than the first proposal, which used the Continental typeface for the word “United”, which looked just plain bad.

This newer effort — slabby, sans-serif, all caps — does convey the authority and purposefulness implicit in the word “United”, and is less radical a departure from previous United logos. My best guess (below) as to the typeface is Trade Gothic Extended, heavied up and with some extra kerning (and I added a hint of drop shadow).

A UAL employee at RDU told me that with the Continental merger and logo change, that they had been given the last batch of boarding pass envelopes etc (of course, another hypothesis is that they are going to do away with this stuff altogether).

She handed me the boarding pass envelope (scanned above) and told me to hang on to it, “You won’t be seeing anymore of these…”

From Ed Tufte, of whom I am insanely jealous…

I’m auctioning my library of rare books, which includes most all of the statistical graphics and epidemiology classics at Christie’s in New York on December 2. This includes Minard maps, nearly all the Playfairs, and all the books used in my 4 books about analytical thinking and design.

Here’s the electronic link to the catalog:

http://www.christies.com/calendar/index.aspx?month=12&year=2010&scids=13

and then click on “ecatalogue”.

Tufte then goes on to give his account of the auction:

Great books foster, transmit, and preserve forever knowledge. The books in my research library were always meant to be used: read, skimmed, read aloud, exhibited, photographed, shared, treasured. And thus my library, which I thought of as The Museum of Cognitive Art, participated intensely in my research, scholarship, writing, teaching, design. For 30 years, the everyday presence of these wonderful books in my life was inspiring and challenging.

I sought to write, design, and publish books worthy of my research library: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983, 2001), Envisioning Information (1990), Visual Explanations (1997), and Beautiful Evidence (2006).

The collection articulated my interests and needs in making my books abut analytical thinking, seeing, showing: high science (Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Lambert), high art (Dürer, Dufy, Picasso, Ernst, Derain, Albers), practical science (history of perspective, dance notation, magic, aviation, and landscape architecture especially Repton), the history of statistical graphics (nearly all of William Playfair’s books, Marey, Minard), epidemiology (Graunt, John Snow), mapping (Halley, Minard), illustrated books (fish, birds, and whatever), and the classics of book design (Hypnerotomachia, Byrnes’ color Euclid, Eric Gill, Bruce Rogers, John Henry Nash, and books published by Giovanni Mardersteig’s Officina Bodoni press). Their time past became my time present and time future.

This diverse and quirky collection found a certain unity in my own books. The relation between my work and the research library is described in several catalog entries.

With this auction, my research library will turn into open-space land (in perpetuity) for making and exhibiting my landscape sculpture and into a museum and gallery, ET Modern, in New York’s Chelsea art district.

Of course, there’s another book (Seeing Around, 2013?) underway as well. There always is.

Edward Tufte

The new Gap logo. Freaking ridiculous. I am sure they tested the shit out of it, but bold Helvetica…? In 2010?

Join Apple Ipad/iPhone (which has actually switched to Helvetica Neue), American Airlines, American Apparel, IRS forms, Target, Crate and Barrel, YouGov (which I think is actually Arial) etc etc, making a bland brand all that more so…

From Hugh Parsonage, a stylized map of Australia’s House of Representatives electoral divisions, showing the Centrebet seat-by-seat voting probabilities. Very interesting, nice work.

PDF on my site; 550px wide JPG below shown in-line.