I recently ran across a chart on Spiegel Online, the most popular German site for online news. The chart was a tilted 3D heatmap in fully saturated primary colors, with a thick black arrow aside.

I quickly uttered my surprise at the presence of such a poorly designed chart – esp. in such a high profile online publication – in a snarky Twitter comment, and soon after, Robert Kosara posted a whole blog post defending the graphic, and calling for “a bit more subtlety in our criticism”.

Well, I am not sure if Twitter was optimized for subtlety, yet, I guess I should clarify a bit the background of my judgement (especially since Robert’s speculative assumptions about my train of thought is not accurate in all points).

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I am back after a small summer break in lovely Bavaria. I would like to point you to some events I will take part in.

alpha-ville symposium Sep 23, London

Find out what post-digitalism might actually mean, with, among others: Filip Visnjic – Architect, Lecturer and Founder of Creative Applications Network, Tom Uglow – Director of Creative Labs Europe, Google, Drew Hemment – Director & Founder of Future Everything etc. And me!

decoded conference 2011 Oct 15, Munich

Last year, I was invited as a speaker, and now I come as a visitor and friend. Looking forward to a really interesting mixture of speakers!

EDIT 2011 Oct 21–23, Røros

I hope I am not jumping the gun here, but you might want to have an eye on the EDIT festival in case you are from Norway! Just saying!

visualizing marathon Dec 3–4, Munich Berlin

I like the sportive idea behind the visualizing marathon, where teams of students compete in producing the best visualization in 24 hours. I will be around for the Munich Berlin event, and give a short introductory speech.

Watch me talk about the notabilia project at “this happened Hamburg” (in German, though!)

And find the slides here.

Also make sure to watch the other speakers as well – everyone was very inspiring and unique!