Visualizing a player for visualizations
18 Jul 2011 by celine
It is alive!!! The player for Visualizing.org I worked on!
It was the hardest thing to design because the content is variable between a Flash, an HTML5 visualization, a static image, an interactive application, a video, etc… Visualizations are a way to illustrate data so that it is easily understandable to people. So the player has to be as invisible as possible offering the best way to share this data on other platforms. We are looking here at an attempt to design and code both in a universal manner so that it is easily embeddable and easily playable.
First we had to understand the series of interactions for each content type in order to analyze them and come up with a standard solution (as standard as we could get that is) for all content types. Then we tackled the brand identity, here being Visualizing.org who is a hub of visualizations that people uploaded offering a large amount of content under creative commons. The main goal was putting the content uploaded and the creator first. I share the same values so that was not a problem.
What was the most difficult was to find a standard way to say : Play / Launch / Visualize this, or if its a static image, View larger. It was an interesting collaboration and the whole team has worked very hard to contribute and come up with the best solution for the present times. I believe this is a first and will lead the way to other visualization players and inspire and be inspired to tweak the designs upon people’s feedback.