Quartz turn everyone into a graphics editor

Quartz creates visualizations — charts, mostly — of data so quickly off the news cycle. The answer involved an in-house tool that made it relatively simple to turn a data set into a chart that fit Quartz’ visual aesthetic.

I was very happy, when tweeting with that tool’s creator, David Yanofsky, to learn that Quartz planned on open-sourcing the tool. It’s built on the amazing D3.js — built by The New York Times’ Mike Bostock — which is immensely powerful but also features a learning curve that’s proven a bit too steep for me. Today, that tool, Chartbuilder, is available for your use. (Here’s a chart of Apple’s stock price since May 3 that I made in about three minutes.)

Nieman Journalism Lab

Augmented Reality Bring Drawing To Life

ColAR (iOS/Android) is “the coloring book of the future.”:

First, you go to colAR’s web site and print out your coloring page of choice (the free app usually comes with one option included and a few others available for in-app purchase, but their full catalog is free until July 28th)… Once you’re done [coloring], pop open the app, and hit the “Play” button to bring up a camera view. Hold your drawing up to the camera, and bam! It takes your work of art and wraps it around an animated 3D model.



TechCrunch

Six digital publishing startups to watch

You know you can blog with Tumblr or WordPress, or self-publish a book on Kindle or iBooks. But what’s next for the publisher who wants to sell a mobile-native magazine, or the blogger who’s sick of messing with plugins?

Here are six startups that offer new options to creators. Three of them — Periodical, 29th Street Publishing and Creatavist — let you create and sell mobile-friendly magazines, ebooks and newsletters; the other three — Postach.io, Ghost and Glipho — aim to let you blog in a new way.

paidContent

Subcompact Publishing

There is an intuitive usability implicit to the physicality of our printed books and magazines. A reader is given two possible directions — which one depends on language and culture. And from there, a mostly linear, usually obvious interface.4

Tablet and smartphone books and magazines are not so obvious. They’re so not obvious that we often need tutorials explaining just how to use them.

Why did we jump to such complex interfaces?

Craig Mod