Axiom Design Partners :: Branding :: Advertising :: Environmental Signage :: Visual Communications

Much to the chagrin of my old man (an ex-journo) - I get very little of my news and current affairs from “traditional” news outlets. I rarely watch TV news (especially commercial channels) and I only buy one newspaper a week - on Saturday - and that’s for the comic section.

I came across this design gem on the internet a while ago and from a designers perspective there is no better way to keep up-to-date on the news than through this visual masterpiece.

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

Check it out for yourself here.