Geography Awareness Week: November 15-21
To kick off this year’s Geography Awareness Week, National Geographic invited all 100 U.S. Senators to draw a map of their home state from memory and to label at least three important places.  Visit the online gallery to see who was up to the challenge (pictured above: map of Wyoming by Sen. Michael Enzi (R)–who knew it was so square?). For more to do, also check out NG

Resume as Infographic
Designer Michael Anderson has created an infographic representation of his resume: View the full-size image.

The sweet spot between Information and Design
Trying to explain what information design is to our families and friends, and yes, potential clients, has been an ongoing challenge for us here at dD. Verbally, I usually resort to something about creating visual explanations for complex sets of data. But that doesn’t really satisfy anyone. Venn Diagram

Typography on TV
The New York Times runs a breezy article on typography mistakes in popular culture which fortunately links to Mark Simonson’s incisive review of the typography in the television show “Mad Men”. Here’s an excerpt: These lipstick ads feature Fenice (1980) with Balmoral (1978) for the script caps. Amazone (1958) for the script lowercase is fine here, but the outline looks too much like a modern computer graphics effect (which is what it is).

Maps: Fighting Disease and Skewing Borders
The Freakonomics blog features a short Q/A with Strange Maps creator Frank Jacobs.  His perspective on maps ranging from the beautiful to the bizarre is the subject of the new book