When the economy seems good in numbers but feels bad in reality
When you think about how the economy is doing these days, it can seem bad when you know people out of work and wages are not keeping up with inflation. The economy can seem good though when the une…
flowingdata.com
Swatching My 2026 SFPS Ink Haul — The Pen Addict
penaddict.com
Hotter days and more of them
Summer 2026 is likely the hottest summer on record since 1895. The NYT editorial board describes the warming days and warns of what is to come. In many parts of the country, extreme heat affects mu…
flowingdata.com
This SoHo Beauty Destination Is Designed for More Than Shopping
Beauty, fragrance, a cafe, and a hidden garden come together in one sensory space
design-milk.com
Observable notebooks get a rewrite
Observable, known for visualization-centric notebooks to share code, restarted fresh to adjust for this new chapter in making things with computers. We obviously cannot pretend that AI does not exi…
flowingdata.com
Making a bunch of line charts
This week, I describe the many small choices one must make while working on a set of charts.
flowingdata.com
Harley-Davidson’s $3,299 Turntable Is Shaped Like Their Logo - Yanko Design
The moment you see the Pro-Ject x Harley-Davidson Turntable, you know exactly what it is, and you know exactly who it is for. That kind of immediate clarity is rare in product design, and it is worth paying attention to. Pro-Ject Audio has built a reputation for doing collaborations the right way. The Austrian turntable
yankodesign.com
Steep rise in electric vehicle sales
For the New York Times, Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer report on the rise in electric vehicle registrations around the world. The snippet of a chart above shows the change between 2020 and 2025 w…
flowingdata.com
IKEA complexity index
Speaking of IKEA, the IKEA complexity index by Greg Technology is a catalog of 20,000 products ranked by how long they take to build. When you get a PAX corner wardrobe, prepare for a manual in 16 …
flowingdata.com
Tariff avoidance in solar manufacturing from China
To avoid heavy solar tariffs, China allegedly moved manufacturing to other countries. When the U.S. caught a whiff, they’d impose new rules to the other countries, and imports would plummet, …
flowingdata.com
Emoji usage and age generations
For NYT’s the Upshot, Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan, and Claire Cain Miller examined the most commonly used emojis and how it changes by generation. 😭 reached the top by leapfrogging 🤣 and 😂…
flowingdata.com
Set expectations and verify
This week, we talk flimsy results and how to work on things that build trust over content.
flowingdata.com
The Daily Heller: 30 Years of Sign Trawling – PRINT Magazine
'Book the Trip' is a travelogue of signs through 700 photographs of rare and one-of-a-kind letterforms.
printmag.com
Google makes it easy to generate fake satellite imagery
Google’s image generation model Nano Banana is now a few clicks away in Google Earth, so you can use satellite views as your canvas and imagine a community, city, and world how you want it. I…
flowingdata.com
Carolina Laudon
Swedish typographer and type designer Carolina Laudon is the first woman president of the ATypI. Ksenya Samarskaya caught up with her after last year’s conference to discuss her role in, and vision for the organization.
typographica.org
Application error probably caused tears in Reflecting Pool
The Washington Post used satellite imagery, photos, and videos from when the blue paint was applied to the Reflecting Pool to figure out what caused the tears in the lining. Of the identified locat…
flowingdata.com
Mapping what is close to you
When deciding where to live, most people want to know what’s nearby so you don’t have to drive an hour to get to the nearest grocery store or school. Close is a mapping tool that shows …
flowingdata.com
Ideas, data, and graphics
This week, I provide an update on my own process from start to finish, in 2026.
flowingdata.com
Geography guessing game, so you can see how bad you are at locations
MapTap is a daily guessing game for geography. You get a location in the world, you mark where you think that location is, and you see how close you are. The closer the guess to the actual location…
flowingdata.com
American ancestry map
For dumb reasons, there are people in power who like to put down immigrants. However, for most people in the United States, you don’t have to look back very far to see where we came from. For…
flowingdata.com
Interpolated time-lapse of Aurora Australis, from space
Seán Doran stringed together time-lapse photos from the International Space Station and interpolated the frames in between to make a smooth high-resolution video. 5,234 images from 2 time-lapse seq…
flowingdata.com
