Five for Friday

The weekly round-up of…five things of interest that are cool, empowering, inspiring and definitely worth checking out.

1. WTF Visualizations — A daily review of worthless charts and data visualizations that make absolutely no sense. Sister or brother to Thumbs Up Viz.

2. IFTTT — What is IFTTT? IFTTT is pronounced like “gift” without the “g.” You need to sift through the site to understand. In short: IFTTT lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement. Make a recipe based on triggers in media channels — an Action results — and data flows…

3. Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See — 40 minutes that will inspire and motivate you to learn, to teach, and to start to really look at the world for its beauty. Executive produced by Edward Tufte.

“This [film] is about patient and dedicated teaching, about learning to look and visualize in order to design, about the importance of drawing. It is one designer’s personal experience of issues that face all designers, expressed with sympathy and encouragement, and illustrated with examples of Inge [Druckrey]’s own work and that of grateful generations of her students. There are simple phrases that give insights into complex matters, for example that letterforms are ‘memories of motion.’ Above all, it is characteristic of Inge that in this examination of basic principles the word ‘beautiful’ is used several times.”  Matthew Carter, Type Designer, 2010 MacArthur Fellow

4. Gepeto – Gepeto is a very cool app, or more of a magical storytelling animation tool, for kids (and adults). Gepeto lets users create exciting narratives by using intuitive puppet gestures, and pops the story right into a beautiful digital playground. It also helps illustrators and artists connect with their audience in incredibly innovative ways. It’s hard to explain, so follow the link and check out the video.

5. Toronto’s Biggest Looser — And this delicious piece from the Globe’s @Nutgraf about the mayoral candidate who came dead dead dead last in Toronto’s recent civic elections. So many golden quotes:

The modern campaign requires a social-media presence. He had none. No Twitter persona, no campaign webpage and no online contact info available. “I’m not really up on the social-media thing,” he said.