New Site Up

The new site is up and running, we want to thank you for your patience. This blog address will no longer be used but we will keep it up for a while so people can find their way to the new site. We've consolidated the blog and the site where we posted graphics into one. The old website is still there, so your bookmarks will work.

We thought that this might work better for us, and enable more participation and discussion from you. We appreciate your support and look forward to your comments and suggestions! We also decided not to go with Wordpress, mainly because I don't want to learn another programming language, we're sticking with Blogger for now. We've also enabled trackbacks and hope you will use them.

Changes coming

Sorry for the slowdown just when we had our biggest hit with the Natanz graphic. The surge in traffic and its validation of our concept has pushed us to make a decision we'd been contemplating for a few weeks.

In order to improve our traffic, ease posting and vastly increase the tools available, we're working to consolidate the GraphicLens.com site and GraphicLens.com/blog so all graphics will post on the blog. We're not sure yet which URL we'll use but either one will get you here.

WordPress will be our new blogging software, mostly because of the extensive plugins and flexibilty. Blogger has been a good starter and may continue as our personal blog software, but the lack of trackbacks has been especially troubling.

We're also going to post more often including posts on the stories behind the graphics and world and national events in general.

Thanks for the boost

Thanks for stopping by. We've only been at this about a month so there isn't much to look at yet. We're trying to cover stories the mainstream/antique/dinosaur/legacy media ignores.

There are lots of excellent analysts and researchers in the blogosphere with vital and interesting stories to tell. Some of the stories, like the construction at Iran's Natanz nuclear plant, can use an assist from graphics.

Please contact us if you have a story you think needs a graphic to help illustrate and explain it.

Thanks to Link Mecca and LGF for the links.

By the way, there's another Natanz graphic below.

Natanz Site Defenses

Here's a quick graphic showing the defensive sites around the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in central Iran. The graphic we posted yesterday shows construction progress and site details.
Click on the items in the legend at the top to see their location on the graphic.

Natanz uranium processing plant

DigitalGlobe's satellite imagery and GlobalSecurity.org's analysis provided the materials we needed to put our skills in informational graphic design and Flash to work on our new interactive graphic. Our goal was to show the amazing defensive measures and what's really undergound at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran.

This is exactly the kind of collaboration we're hoping GraphicLens can provide for the entire spectrum of today's new media.

We aligned the satellite images in Photoshop CS2. That step alone showed some interesting comparisons and allowed us to mark the exact locations of the now-underground buildings and tunnels. We storyboarded the graphic in Freehand MX and imported much of the work from Freehand into Flash where Jeremy did the animation and programming. The entire process, from receiving the latest satellite image from DigitalGlobe to posting was far smoother than previous graphics. We're learning much more with each project.

Deb's been researching Iran's nuclear facilities and missile forces which we'll use to add chapters to the Natanz graphic. It's certain to be a challenge for my MaPublisher skills.

The Natanz graphic is also posted on GlobalSecurity.org with a link on their main page and on their WMD/Natanz page. Many thanks to John Pike and Chuck Herring for their help.

Media Locations

This interactive Flash map shows that most of the top national media headquarters are in counties that voted for Kerry in 2004. Most journalists working in the national media live in large metro areas that voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Maybe this has something to do with the perceived and measured liberal bias in the mainstream media.

We sat down Friday evening and decided to do a graphic using our new GIS mapping software, Avenza's MAPublisher. It really made a difference. We found the data at this site, downloaded it and pointed MAPublisher at it. The rest was almost as easy.

Please leave your comments and feel free to e-mail us with suggestions for this or other graphics.

Media Bias

Acknowledgement of bias within the mainstream media runs the gamut from vehement and absolute denial to smug acceptance. Several studies have documented the fact that the media's credibility is declining. This UCLA study tries to measure the amount of bias.
A teeter-totter seemed appropriate to illustrate the imbalance. Some have criticized the study for showing Drudge and the Wall Street Journal as left of center. Those critics probably haven't read the whole report (pdf) for the author's explanations.
This graphic got many times more hits than the Pakistan/Kashmir earthquake graphic. A link from Cox & Forkum was a big boost to our traffic.

Pakistan Earthquake

Now that the GraphicLens blog is up we're actually posting on our earlier graphics.



In our first graphic the point we tried to make, probably too subtly, was that the Pakistan/Kashmir earthquake, extremely tragic though it is, provided an opportunity to broaden perspectives in an area where Islamic terrorism breeds.

The inspiration came from a post at Security Watchtower.

Tools and productivity

The right tools make the journey from concept to publication much more enoyable and have a direct impact on productivity. At GraphicLens we're acquiring and using the right tools as we can afford them. Today we took a giant leap forward by adopting Avenza's MAPublisher to generate vectored maps from GIS data. The improvement is amazing.

The Pakistan Earthquake map, our first graphic, was built from several JPEG and PDF maps rectified and traced in Freehand 9. The map alone took most of a day to draw. With MaPublisher we use GIS data which is available free on the internet, though packages of data are also compiled and sold by various companies. Most governments make updated datasets available for free too.

Today I "drew," or rather had MAPublisher and Freehand MX, another recent upgrade, "draw," maps of the world, Iran, Iraq, Israel, North America and the Middle East in just a couple of minutes each, including finding and downloading the datasets.


In case you're interested, here are the big pieces we're using to do our thing. We're an all Apple Macintosh family, though we do have one older PC, mainly for testing and some games.

Computers:

• iMac G5 2Ghz, 20" (Maps, research, photo work, vector illustrations, misc.)
• PowerMac G4 dual 867mhz (Flash production, research, writing, misc.)
• PowerBook Titanium 1ghz 15" (Research and writing)
• PowerMac G4 500mhz (server)

Software:

• Macromedia Studio
• Adobe Creative Suite CS2 Premium
• MAPublisher
• Apple iLife
• Safari