Chris Ware Animation

Chris Ware's animation work for This American Life could act as great inspiration for our motion graphics projects. His simple drawing style is clear and straightforward and it helps create a mood perfect for the story. Also take note of the way he uses zooms and pans. These could be really helpful techniques in our own projects.

Season Two Animation: be sure to check out this one too

Edward Tufte

Napoleon's March to Moscow

"The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly—to develop strategies of seeing and showing."

An American statistician, Edward Tufte writes, designs and publishes books on analytical design. As a professor at Yale University, Tufte teaches statistics, information design, interface design and political economy. He is also an expert on informational graphics, including charts and diagrams. With strong disdain for PowerPoint, Tufte travels around the nation giving frequent lectures on how to successfully present data and information. His current projects involve landscape sculpture, printmaking and video.

Edward Tufte: homepage
PowerPoint is Evil: an article written by Tufte for Wired Magazine

Nigel Holmes

How to greet people in other countries

Illustrator and designer, Nigel Holmes creates graphics, illustrations and animations that try to explain things. Calling his work "explanation graphics", his projects include advertising, books, charts, diagrams, logos, branding and websites. Holmes now runs the design firm Explanation Graphics and has written six books dealing with information design, including the book Wordless Diagrams.

Nigel Holmes: homepage
Vampire Energy: motion graphic collaboration with Good Magazine
Simplifying the Complex: an interview with Nigel Holmes

Richard Saul Wurman

Page from Understanding Healthcare

"The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to
understand. It is at that moment that you can make
something understandable."

An American architect and graphic designer, Richard Saul Wurman is considered a pioneer in the the practice of making information understandable. With the belief that society creates massive amounts of information but with little care or order, Wurman coined the phrase "information architect." These principles of knowledge and understanding advocate the use of innovative design and editorial techniques to make data more visual and comprehensible. As founder of TED, Wurman has written and designed over 80 books, all of which focus on a topic that he personally had difficulty understanding.

Understanding Healthcare: wurman's visual encyclopedia on healthcare
About TED: how TED started
InfoDesign Interview: an interesting interview with wurman

Get Out The Vote Facts & Stories

In 2004, 20.1 million 18 – 29 year-olds voted, a 4.3 million jump over 2000. The turnout increase among the youngest voters was more than double that of any other age group.

Research of today's youth shows that young people are actively following politics and the election news even closer than in 2004. This gives strong hope and possibility to making this year's young voter turnout even higher than before. By employing a sense of camaraderie present in the sheer size of the demographic, young people will feel like their growing rates of voter turnout can and will make a difference.

1 in 3 African American men will be imprisoned in their lifetime. This is compared to 1 in 5 Latinos and 1 in 20 Caucasians. In 2004, 1 in 12 African Americans were denied the right to vote because of a felony conviction.

Mandeep K. Dhami's analysis Prisoner Disenfranchisement Policy:
a Threat to Democracy? states that:
The right to vote is one of the fundamental principles of democracy. However, full suffrage of the adult population has not been realized in many present-day democracies. Internationally, millions of prisoners are disenfranchised. Being excluded from the civic process is a threat to democracy. Removing a prisoner's right to vote can lead to inequality and injustice that is counter to democratic ideals.

Get Out The Vote Project Objectives

Using time, motion and sound as tools, we must create a motion graphic to help visually represent a statistic dealing with the upcoming election. Often times, data and statistics are too abstract and too complex to fully grasp. By animating the data, viewers will be able to better understand and comprehend the information. Not only must we give meaning to the viewer, but we must help them see, feel and sense the data. This will help the viewer form a clear, concrete understanding.