Normally I would have a blind spot to web polls like online advertising, but not these from Spot The Tiger. Each week a new poll is illustrated by a guest designer and put up for vote, there’s some great designs and interesting results.

Pictured above: Nuclear weapons by Nazario Graziano, Smoking by Ed Nacional and Alcohol minimum price by Adam Morris.

It’s that time of year when designers across the globe check out what Nicholas Felton has been up too the previous year in his annual report. As always, meticulously recorded data and beautifully put together. Letterpressed print version available from his shop (only 2000 copies).

Haven’t actually been there, but I am planning to go next year, only fair since they’ve named a mountain after me ;). Linz (Land Information New Zealand) just released a new series of 1:50k today, so I headed over expecting it part with a fair amount of cash to buy all the maps I needed to walk the 1800 mile Te Araroa. Much to my delight you can download them all for free!

Good work New Zealand, I only wish more countries would make their maps available for free :)

Up until today I wished I made a more unique name than Simon Cook, there’s shit loads of them out there! I could never get near the top of the google rankings, although I’m now slowly making my way up there, currently 5th :)

But I’ve seen 2 things today that made me happy that I’ve got loads of other namesakes. First up is this Personas site by Aaron Zinman from MIT it searches the internets for you and your namesakes and creates a visual aggregation of their online identities. I think the final result is a bit of a let down (I’m sure Jonathan Harris could do some much more interesting with the data). But watching the other Simon Cook’s and things they are up to flashing across the screen was quite fascinating.

Then I randomly went to see what Craig Robinson (Flip Flop Flyin’) was up to. He’s snapped up CraigRobinson.com when it became available, and rather than use it himself, he’s made a site linking up all the Craig Robinsons out there!

I love the idea, I think there should be a law that ‘name URLs’ should link up everyone that shares the name. I would definitely do the same if SimonCook.com ever became available.

Illustration Art wrote an interesting post about how differently artists sometimes interpret reality when they draw maps. The stand out example for me was this map of New York in the shape of a huge penis, that’s a lot of effort for a nob gag ;)

I was searching the web for infographic inspiration yesterday and stumbled across the work of JD Hooge on his site Gridplane. All his work is top notch, but I was particularly taken by his Data Visualisation project for Google. It’s just designs, no link to a working product, but hopefully Google will release to soon, looks great.

As soon as I saw his name, the first thing that came to mind was a pixel font I used to like back in the day – Hooge. Had a quick check and I reckon it was indeed named after him, as it seem Hooge and the maker, Craig Kroeger founded a studio together.

The always fascinating BibliOdyssey has un-earthed and scanned some of those cartoon political maps. I’m a big fan of maps and a big fan of cartoons, so seeing them both together always puts a smile on my face. Here’s the Satirical Maps post, here’s an older post - Dogs of War, specifically about First World War maps.

Here’s a few more that I like – Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark, European Revue (Kill That Eagle) and Das heutige Europa.

I’m particularly puzzled by this one below, what on earth could be going on there ;)

Lovely little pet project – New Math, by Craig Damrauer. Also check out his web design portfolio, pretty impressive.

Via: One Floor Up.

I‘ve seen the ‘If the world were a village of 100 people‘ stats before, most notably the animated Miniature Earth site. But Toby Ng has taken these stats and produced a series of 20 infographic posters to re-tell the story in a simple and effective way. Check out his The World of 100 here »

Via: One Floor Up.

I came across the work of always with honor on Cargo. It’s a collaboration between Tyler Lang & Elsa Chaves (whose personal sites are well worth a look), they specialise in simple/fun icons and infographics.

Probably the most common questioned I get asked is - what have you got planned for your next walk? Well I’ve booked some cheap flight to Switzerland (£40 return, can you believe that? – Aer Lingus), ordered some maps and have been planning the route all weekend :) Click the image for a bigger map of our planned route.

I haven’t been to the Alps since ’95 (I used to go just about every year) so it’s about time for a visit. I’ve been keeping my eye on a new series of long distance trails crossing the Alps called Via Alpina. They just updated their site with lots more info on the routes and handy download-able section pdfs. There’s 5 trails in all, the daddy being the Red Route which is 1500 miles. Also found the site of Judy Armstrong who did a loop mostly on the Via Alpina trails, crossing the Alps twice in a whooping 3,300 mile single season trip!

I’ve a picked a little section for me and Nicky across Switzerland (Bernese Alps), mostly on the Green route, but with a bit of the Red at the end. As well as being part of the Via Alpina, (most of) the route seems generally known as the Alpine Pass Route. I found a site – Activity Workshop, that has a lot of online information about the walk, they also plotted the route on google maps which I’ve found quite handy. Also there’s a Cicerone guide of the Alpine Pass Route, by the legendary Kev Reynolds.

Can’t wait till the end of June now, I’ll be blogging as we go as usual. Hopefully if Nicky enjoys herself, we might plan a full traverse of the Alps in 2010 :)

Some wise words about getting shit done – The Cult of Done Manifesto by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, illustartion by James Provost.

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Via: Frank.

I‘ve got nothing against those iconic weather symbols, but it’s nice to see a weather forecast presented in a different way. See all the different weather images here »

Via: Hell Yeah Dude.

Imade this map of the CDT split into each section with basic info like how far it was in between towns, what I thought our daily mileage would be based on the terrain and estimated date we’d be getting to each place. We found it incredibly useful to visualise an overview of the route ahead and get a quick mental summary of the next state etc.

I hope that someone planning their future CDT hike will find this post and find the maps useful. I’ve made 2 new version for you to download (both zipped files contain a jpeg & pdf version):

• First map – with blank labels for you to print out and write in your eta.
• Second map – with the our actual daily mileages and dates that we walked the CDT to use as reference. (I’ve fudged a few figures to make it more consistent). I would say that our pace was fairly ‘average’ our target was 20 miles a day, which seems to be most peoples target.

For more more info on our hike, see our ‘proof that we actually did it’ site here »

Oh and of course the base map is courtesy of Monsieur Google (his terrain view is kick-ass).

Just been looking through Grundini, the online portfolio of Peter Grundy. A lot of the work feels familiar then I read he’s been doing his stylised infographics, illustartion, art and type since 1980 and still going strong. Made me think about the future of my career and where I’ll be in 2030?! I’ll I hope I’m still designing and drawing, and I hope that it’s as good as Peter’s work! Anyhow, be sure to check out his hi-res downloadable book.