chartsnthings: Shan Carter (and an army of others) share some sketches from the NYT electoral map /

Kevin Quealy :

…no one was really super thrilled with maps as the main conduit for the analysis. Instead, they decided on minimizing the geography and using “bins” for states. (Shan has sort of been obsessed with “bins” since 2008, when his dream of having states magically fall into buckets on election night ultimately didn’t pan out. I personally had to cheer him up after that and it was not pretty.)

Here is another great reminder for map-happy news nerds that sometimes the important patterns of a story are not really geographic in a way that is best conveyed through a choropleth or proportional symbol map. This graphic is brilliant and the process behind it is well worth your time.

/ on tumblr: http://blog.dannydebelius.com/post/23100695327/chartsnthings-shan-carter-and-an-army-of-others

Great, Another Bootstrap Site /

Paul Scrivens:

If you have done your time and learned design or coding, then frameworks offer you a great way to take some shortcuts, but only because you know how to tweak your way through them when things get rough. If you are using Bootstrap to quickly get a site out the door, I understand the importance of launching fast and early, but spend a couple of hours making sure your site doesn’t look like the thousand other Bootstrap sites out there.

Nailed it. Bootstrap is an incredible tool that is easily abused by those who see it as a theme. Don’t look at Bootstrap as a coat of paint to slap haphazardly onto your site. See it as a power sprayer that will let you blast through some of the solved problems of front-end code organization so you can focus on the details of the interface.

/ on tumblr: http://blog.dannydebelius.com/post/18906506340/great-another-bootstrap-site

"From my perspective, Smashing could have created a better overall experience with only three unique layouts (the first, third, and fifth). And, perhaps more importantly, they would have greatly reduced the complexity of maintaining the site by doing so. I can’t help but wonder if maintaining six unique layouts is going to become a nightmare down the road. "

"Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture."

"Making something obvious is expensive because it often means you have to make a whole bunch of other things less obvious. Obvious dominates and only one thing can truly dominate at a time. It may be worth it to make that one thing completely obvious, but it’s still expensive."