Support the FSU Film School Master Thesis films for 2012 on Kickstarter. There are 23 filmmakers and and 18 films being produced. Beyond their small student budget, these students are looking get just $1000 extra each to make even better films. Watch their video below and support them on Kickstarter today!



Also - this whole video was shot in one continuous shot! Crazy!

Thesis sneak-peekery

Visualizing food a bajillion different ways (official explanation)

Lauren Manning Design Work

Hi my name is Lauren Manning and here's a bit of my work in a temporary portfolio while my full site is under construction. here is my new portfolio site.

I am a designer, thinker and storyteller interested in constructing brand stories through design systems, solving problems with collaborative thinking and innovative solutions, and creating a narrative from raw data to communicate effectively through visualization.

Contact: lmanning729@gmail.com

For more information on any project, my resume or recommendations, feel free to email me.


Data Communication/Visualization
“It’s like comparing apples to oranges.” This phrase is the best way to describe the current state of data visualizations. For the designer, its easy to find good visualizations and bad ones, but how to apply the successful elements of particular designs to one’s own data set starts to get a little more complicated. Data sets vary tremendously, so one man’s brilliant solution can be another’s complete failure. Instead of seeing many excellent visualizations of all different data sets, what if you could see tons of visualizations of the same data set? What new comparisons, knowledge and structure might be developed from this?

Using a data set created from two years of meticulous life documenting, I visualized one point of data – food consumed – over forty ways. Exploring various methods, techniques, styles, degrees of complexity, degrees of additional context and many other elements, a true “apples to apples” comparison has emerged.

The project has been featured on datavisualization.ch and infosthetics.com.

















The Curiosity Project
The Curiosity Project is an effort to bridge the very unique gap between the print and digital worlds. By combining QR codes (that work!), a blog, hand making and pure curiosity the hope is to restructure the way we interact with both print and digital media.

















Be Versatile
Part of a self promotion piece, this project showcases multiple hand-crafted techniques to create various letterforms spelling the phrase “Be Versatile.” The making of all of the letters was videotaped and the one hundred hours of footage compressed into a two minute high speed time lapse. The video shows the “proof” of the making process while the phrase itself it meant to inspire designers to use methods beyond the computer to explore ways of communicating.

Journalism in the Age of Data: A Video Report on Data Visualization by Geoff McGhee

Journalism in the Age of Data by Geoff McGhee

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

This is quite possibly the most valuable find in the thesis research so far. It is a spectacular video on the state of news design and information design. The video was put together by Geoff McGhee and I have to say, the flash version of the video has blown me away. For each of the 8 sections, there are tabs and as a new speaker or topic comes up, tabs with relevant information appear along the bottom. If you have an hour to spare, I HIGHLY recommend taking a peek at this video. Each section is also available as a podcast.

The Beauty of Data Visualization

This is a talk by David McCandless, author of Visual Miscellaneum, at TEDGlobal 2010 this July. He's is journalist turned designer and in his talk he discusses some great concepts. He mentions how incredibly vital context is when creating and understanding an infographic. I think that is so true, especially with all of the infographics now used in the media. We think we're better understanding an issue or problem, but if the proper context is not included, we could be totally off the mark.

McCandless says he loves finding hidden patterns within data. I could not agree more and I think thats a huge reason for my daily life documenting project (ongoing for 637 days as of today, Sept 29). The revealing of hidden trends and patterns through data design is definitely one of the best parts.

Here is the original video from TED. TED = awesome. Also if you're as enamored with a few of his comments as I was...surprise, TED has a Interactive Transcript feature that allows you to skip around to any specific moment in the presentation by phrase.