I'm happy judging a book by it's cover

Spacesuit, Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux

I saw a review of this fascinating book over at Maria Popova's Brain Pickings (http://bit.ly/tUgfz5) and I couldn't resist getting a copy. It's a wonderful account of how the ingenuity Playtex trumped the established military contractors in the race to develop the spacesuit. The book is lovely. The dust wrapper is made from a rubberised material making it feel beautifully tactile, evoking the suit itself. The spacesuit was constructed from 21 layers and this is also the structure for the book. It's a cleverly put together piece, a great object and a great read.

Virtual Water Footprint Poster

I picked up this poster a couple years ago, and I must admit I've neglected it a bit. However I've finally got the wall space for it in my new office (it's A0), so it's going up.  I love the simplicity of the graphics and the simple but shocking comparisons such as Tea v Coffee.

Designed by Timm Kekeritz in 2007 and based on the study by Hoeckstra et al. in their study Water Footprint of Nations. It uses one of my favourite font families of all time; Thesis by Luc(as) de Groot of http://www.lucasfonts.com/. Specifically it uses TheSans and TheSerif. 

The great irony of the poster is that paper is the most water intensive item on it.

Here's a little bit on the theory:

[excerpt from waterfootprint.org]
Virtual water content: The virtual-water content of a product (a commodity, good or service) is the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced (production-site definition). It refers to the sum of the water use in the various steps of the production chain. The virtual-water content of a product can also be defined as the volume of water that would have been required to produce the product at the place where the product is consumed (consumption-site definition). We recommend to use the production-site definition and to mention it explicitly when the consumption-site definition is used. The adjective ‘virtual’ refers to the fact that most of the water used to produce a product is not contained in the product. The real-water content of products is generally negligible if compared to the virtual-water content.

It's good to see that the idea has been taken further, see more here: http://virtualwater.eu/

More about them and their design agency is http://raureif.net/

2012 calendar

I quite like this approach for calendars. Having a hand printed single image that remains all year with the months as simple tear off sheets. This one is by Hammerpress ( http://hammerpress.net ).

Swedish lighthouse drawings

Spotted these wonderful drawings on the side of the lighthouse at Sandhammaren on the South Eastern tip of Sweden. They depict the different lighthouse types along that stretch of coastline.

Visualising music - 21 Notations

Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer, from Mark Batty Publisher.

I was really excited to get this in the mail, I'd seen a few blog posts and it looked great. I'm lucky enough to have a couple of issues of Source Magazine which first sparked an interest in these innovative approaches to music notation, so I new this wasn't a book to miss out on. 

It's even better in person. It's lovingly produced on a great mat stock that makes the 'notations' and scores look and feel wonderful. There's a diverse mix of styles and techniques with great insight into why the composer took their particular approach. 

Anyone looking at the current trends in data visualisation should definitely take the time to peruse this book, full of inspiration at tackling one of the oldest and most difficult visualisation tasks. 

There's a website and the blog also looks good.

http://notations21.net/notations21/

Get it from Amazon UK here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0979554640