Visual Complexity

The main theme of the Visual Complexity blog is, according to the author Manuel Lima, the “visualization of complex networks.” It is actually a part of a larger website, also run by Lima, whose purpose is to “leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.” Lima has a BFA in industrial design and an MFA in Design and technology. He created the website and the blog out of a desire to “inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.”

The VC blog, though not actually related to either medicine or animation, seems to be targeting roughly the same audience as my blog: namely, people who are interested in combining science, technology, art. As this is a rather niche area of interest, it seems logical to assume that the blog has a relatively small, yet faithful, following. However, I am unable to find much evidence either confirming or refuting this assumption. Some of the posts have quite a few comments, but there are many others that have no comments on it at all. If there are large numbers of readers, they certainly don’t leave much trace of themselves. When “visual complexity” is typed into Google, Lima’s site is the first one on the list. Because of Google’s method of giving priority to pages with more links to and from them, this would seem to imply that the blog, or at least the site of which it is a part, is relatively popular. And it doesn’t appear on Technorati’s blog ranking list so it’s impossible to find out that way. Also, Lima doesn’t blog very often: there are only 9 new posts since the beginning of 2010.

I find the blog really interesting because I’ve never seen any other blog quite like it. The Visual Complexity blog has, appropriately, relatively little text and lots of images. Most of Lima’s posts are comments on some new technology, or a new program/work of art that has come out recently. For example, in his post “Artforms of Nature,” he has two beautiful images created with a new plug-in for photoshop and based on the work of German Biologist Earnst Haekel. In another post, he critiques an article about the future of infographics, points out some flaws in the author’s arguments, and presents his own views. He also provides links to the article as well as to one of the tools the artist discusses (which in spite of the article written about it is still very fun to play with). Overall, the posts are professional, short on words, long on images, and full of links to the sites that Lima comments on.

Because of the purposes of my blog, I’ll have to have more words and fewer pictures. However, I definitely like the copiousness of links throughout Lima’s posts and I hope to emulate that in my blog.