Seriously cool websites

Want to spend some good chunks of time on the internet? Then check out the Webby Awards! (Disclaimer: It’s very easy to spend a LOT of time checking these out…)

Some really innovative, creative, beautiful, informative websites. Particularly noteworthy are the categories to do with net art, navigation design, use of motion graphics, design etc. For example, in the animation nominations there was the Adobe Museum of Digital Media – I explored this and found an exhibition showcasing the works of several “visual pioneers” – people like Jonathan Harris combining art and data to create visualisations of people interacting with technology. Some really great ones to look at, and the user experience design is great. Man I love artistic data aggregation!

Jonathan Harris is a cool dude

I thought it’d be nice to start off the blog with some examples from an online documentary maker whose works are AMAZING! Jonathan Harris combines data aggregation, interactivity and creativity to make beautifully inventive non-linear works about humanity and its online condition. You can and should check them out at http://www.number27.org/.

An example of one his most successful works is We Feel Fine – an exploration of human emotions taken from the newest updated blog entries, about 15000 quotes a day. There are different ways of navigating through this data, including ‘madness’ (free-form whizzing colour-coded dots), ‘mounds’ (collections of emotions presented in order of popularity) and a search bar to look for the emotional updates from specific groups (according to emotion, gender, age, location, etc). Is this a documentary or just a fancy well-designed mine of statistics? I’d like to go with online documentary… especially because the content is constantly evolving, the website captures a wide narrative of any given moment. It is a controversial member of the genre but I think it is a great example of how technology can be really embraced to depict a reality.

Likewise, I really like Harris’ work I Want You To Want Me. It’s in a similar vein to We Feel Fine, but using data from online dating sites. I think it’s really beautiful. See for yourself!