Black, white, and graphic design — a look back on my typography in my Yale college days

1995 marks the beginning of my graphic design career. I went to Yale originally to study architecture but I decided to take some graphic design classes because I thought that it would help as I didn’t know anything about design.

The decision to study art was mostly rebellious in nature. Unlike my classmates who mostly come from a fine art background, I was a science nerd in high school (1). I decided to study art mainly because I was sick of living under the shadow of my older sister (2). I also thought that it would make sense for me to utilize the opportunity to study something I know nothing about (3).

The graphic design program at Yale was mostly typography driven. That is, Yale does not really teach graphic design the way other art schools do (4). The only actual “skill” that was taught is typography. There are no rules. Assignments are extremely open-ended. Typically the assignments are something that can be summarized in a sentence—e.g. “Do something with the the dollar bill.” You can interpret the assignment in anyway you see fit. So it was fun to see what ended up showing up in class the next week.

In my free time I work on designs for student events and journals because it was fun. Usually I designed everything in black and white first because my HP LaserJet only prints black and white (5) so using colors would mean not being able to see how things are until I spend money to then print them in color at the printshop. Color printing (Fiery) was expensive in those days, so to save costs for most projects we also ended up printing things in black and white. What I learned doing this was that black and white is usually a good first step to do any designs. If something does not work in black and white then there is no reason to go color. This is a philosophy that I utilize even when I design for interface these days. It is a good metric as a small percentage of people are colorblind, so to fulfill true universal usability requirements, the interface must work even when viewed in black and white.

I was introduced to the beautiful designs by Emigre (6) and Eye Magazine (7) by my Yale professors (8). As such my designs during my college days also feature a ton of Emigre fonts—mostly I think because I don't really know of other foundries maybe. I learned the fine art of grid layout mostly by reading Eye. Yale does not teach layouts (as noted above and also in footnote 4), so I learn by observing how the masters do it and interpret things on my own.

The Yale design philosophy is simple: question everything—why and why not. There are no rights and wrongs. Critiques at Yale are very open ended. But we need to justify every single decision we make. Questions: why is the type set in this font? Why this size? Why is the image placed here? We ask only why, and we must be able to reason everything. In the end, what was taught is removal of all things unessential until the final product becomes an extreme reduction of TMIs. When I look at designs today, I see all kinds of added ornaments: swash, drop shadows, rounded corners—decorations. To me, good designs need no embellishment. Good designs speak for themselves.

Good design is clean and clear. Good design communicates. Good design is transparent. When you see good design, the apparent design disappears and all you see is the message.

Pictured from top:

• Discourses: an Asian American journal of arts and criticisms. Volume 2 No 1. PDF amazingly still live on the web: www.yale.edu/discourses/images/dis_2.pdf Edited by Pearle Lee and Jaya N. Kasibhatla. Pearle is now my client for a hedge fund after I moved back to Hong Kong — crazy yes? Seems even though I was a social-phobe in college some friendships do last forever.
• Program notes from Jonathan Edwards College Chamber Players. Brett Austad and Joshua Richman, music directors. Olivia Blander MUS ’98, Heather Losey CC ’98, Daniel Adamson DC ’98, Rafenna Michalsen TC’01, Betsy Tao BK ’98, Rebecca Reich DC’00, David Blasher DC’01, Andrew Guenzer DC’01. April 28, 1998.
• Kurasawa Film Festival program notes. A tribute to Akira Kurosawa by the Yale Film Society, Council on East Asian Studies, and Yale College Japan Association. Organization committee: Rene Brar, Andrew J Cohen, Aaron Epstein, Makiko Kitamura, Shoshana Litt, Geoffrey Sledge. January 24-29, 1999. Whitney Humanities Center.

Notes:

1. To give a perspective on this, my organic chemistry class in high school fulfills the lab requirements for “freshman orgo” designed for premed students under the tutelage of McBride. I also took Physics 220 and other classes while at Yale with other premed nerds.
2. MSL also went to Yale to study Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. She graduated summa cum laude / second in her class (CC’99) and went on to study at Harvard Medical School and Columbia Medical School and become the MD PhD that she is today. She snapped a ton of patents in AIDS research and published several papers on Nature for discovering the protein related to Alzheimer’s. Looking back, my decision to study art was sound because there is no way I will ever become anyone stuck behind the expectations from other people to achieve as well as she does.
3. Most people I know go to school to earn good grades to look good on their CV. I thought that the tuition was hard earned money by my dad so I studied a ton of things which I knew nothing about: accounting, gender studies, computer law, operational research. I did not get very good grades from these, but the knowledge I gained from learning these subjects are beneficial to my day-to-day work to this day.
4. The philosophy (I believe) is that you can learn software on your own so no classes will teach you how to use them. Design as a visual language is highly subjective so it does not really make sense to critique what is good or bad. So unlike many art schools where the graduation show is filled with designs with a particular style, the graduation shows at Yale are always very interesting because students show projects which show a huge range of diversity.
5. I had the HP LaserJet 4MV. It prints 11 x 17 in (US Tabloid). It was awesome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_4#4V
6. Emigre, also known as Emigre Graphics, is a digital type foundry, publisher and distributor of graphic design centered information based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1984 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry also published Emigre magazine between 1984 and 2005. Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigre
7. Eye Magazine, The International Review of Graphic Design is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture. First published in London in 1990, Eye was founded by Rick Poynor, a prolific writer on graphic design and visual communication. Poynor edited the first twenty-four issues (1990-1997). Max Bruinsma was the second editor, editing issues 25–32 (1997–1999), before its current editor John L. Walters took over in 1999. Stephen Coates was art director for issues 1-26, Nick Bell was art director from issues 27-57, and Simon Esterson has been art director since issue 58. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_(magazine)
8. I owe much of who I am today to the years of patience and encouragement to my graphic design professors: John Gambell, Paul Elliman, Jenny Chan and Michael Rock. SML Thank You.

/ SML.20130101.PHIL.SML.Design.Typography.History.Yale.Edu.Opinions
/ #smlphil #smlhistory #smlopinions #smledu #seeminglee #smlme #ccby #smlphotography #smluniverse
/ #yale #edu #history #design #typography #philosophy #us #graphicdesign #opinions #ux #userexperience #usability #eye #eyemagazine #emigre #fonts #grid #layouts
/ #HongKong #HK #香港 #China #中國 #中国 #MaOnShan #馬鞍山

Diversity – or why I moved from New York to Hong Kong to create SML Universe

There is a saying that ”every 7 years is a cycle”. I am not religious – but I did spend time studying philosophies from different religions and schools of thoughts – and interestingly the number 7 as an indicator for cycles kept coming up. This is interesting to me. Whether you believe in such numerology or not, I recognize that today, on my 36th birthday, was a moment of rebirth within my fifth cycle, for a decision which took me a year to finalize: my move from New York to Hong Kong after working and living for all of my adult life in America.

Those who know me for long know that I have traditionally been very active in social media – be it on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, SoundCloud, Tumblr, FriendFeed, YouTube, Vimeo – basically as someone I met on these social network said, I am everywhere. But if you look at the year before July 2012, I could not be found on the internet. I tweeted a couple of times mostly as an ambient device to let people (mostly my family) know that I was not dead, but that's about it. I did this because I wanted to not have any outside influence on my decision. I wanted to make sure that it makes the most sense to me. But to tell you why I made such a drastic decision, I have to tell you a little bit of myself.

As a gay man growing up in Hong Kong, I remember crying every single day after school in private – there was not a single day that I was not bullied. When I was accepted to Yale, I got excited because I thought that if Yale truly lived up to the popular claim of “one in four and maybe more” then I should be ok. It turns out that although Gayalies was a nice support group, my being Chinese was not that awesome within the predominantly WASP presence. I was invited to some Asian American functions but because I was gay, I did not feel welcome either. As an art major with close to none art background, I was not much of an item. Being a programmer almost automatically labeled me as a non-artist. When I took an interaction design class at the MFA program, I focus on making the programs work and not how pretty they are – it was completely dissed. I also recalled telling my graphic design professors that I had a great time the summer after my sophomore year (1997) working at Agency.com and they just gave me a disapproving look and questioned why I would want to do web design which was (and probably still is) ‘99% garbage’ anyway. Even after I started working for an interactive agency, since I prefer PC (at the time) over Mac (seriously OS9 is crap, sorry), I don't really fit in. The IT department thought of me as a trouble maker and annoyed their software licensing process. And if you think that coming out to your parents is difficult (I did that when I was 14), try coming out as a PC user at an AIGA event. I also had a lot of trouble explaining what is that I do – I use programming as part of my prototyping process to design interaction – which I felt and do still feel is the only way you can design interaction – to experience what you design as you refine over time. Storyboards just don't cut it. People like to place me as either category, but I am neither and I am both. It was very frustrating. I am thankful that over time I have met some people who became mentors to me because they understand me, but they are also far and few between. As a minority in a minority in a minority, I have never felt my voice heard. I struggled my entire life but I also accepted that reality that I would simply be a loner. I am ok with that.

Fast forward to the summer of 2007, I was invited to cover the gay pride parade for a company. Since I was already there, I also took the opportunity to photograph everyone else in the event. It was a very emotional experience for me. Before then I had long disregarded the gay pride as a complete marketing machine. But after that day, I truly understood why so many gay men and women choose to march down sixth avenue every year – the joy of being accepted. On that sunny afternoon, the streets were packed. It was a city-wide party. People all over the tri-state area came to New York. They were cheering in ecstacy. Yes I know they were probably cheering for the hot guys and gals wearing close to nothing :) but it doesn't much matter. For the first time, I feel accepted. If you had not been accepted for who you are all your life, you would understand how it felt. I have never experienced that until then.

When I got home that night, I wrote a manifesto about life:



Later, I created a Flickr group called Life Celebrates Diversity (Twitter) so people who do not feel heard can have a voice. As I started doing more photojournalism and started blogging about art, I suddenly recognized that there are a lot of artists around who do not have much media exposure because they are simply don't have the know-how to gain the social media klout. I have long been interested in network theories, and I enjoy using social networks and for a large degree Google as a testbed for network theory experiments, so I created SML Fine Art (Twitter), a Flickr group with the mission to preserve the diversity of art – be them small, medium or large.

All of my Flickr groups have a common objective and guiding principal: it sets no limits – no one is there to ‘curate’ the content. Life doesn't pose a limit on us, so who am I to set a limit on others? Subsequently I have created many others: SML Graphic Design (Twitter), SML Viz (Twitter), etc – all areas where I am interested in. I created them so it accepts everyone. It was also a really great way for me to notice works of interest and subsequently gave me the opportunity to meet them in person.

Since I belong to a ton of visual social networks anyway, I am more than happy to post things of interest to FFFFound, which get tweeted, and auto-post to Tumblr and basically let things sip inside the social net – a process which a friend called the ‘incestuous reality of any social network’. My hope is that through these networks the work which I believe to be important would at least gain a little bit of much deserved voice. This is what my passion lies: to do what I can to give a voice to the little guys – those whose voice were not heard mostly out of bigotry. I never had a voice when I was younger, and I wish for others that they could have the opportunity to be accepted.

I wanted to do this full time for a long time, but I could not while I was in New York. As an ’alien’ in America, I was bound by US law to work full time at a company. As such I joined a couple of startups whose philosophies appear to be in line with mine. Unfortunately, as investments come in and when revenue matters, so did their business plan. They were wonderful folks, but I cannot really work full time at a job which pays me no salary and are not inline with my philosophy. I am grateful and thankful for the experience – I have learned a lot, but I thought that it was time that I moved on and do my own thing. Having my own company allows me to do that. It doesn't really pay much right now. Starting from scratch is difficult. But you cannot measure value with a dollar sign. I have done a lot of freelance in the past in New York for lots of money but it never buys me happiness. I now only work on things which I believe to be meaningful regardless of pay. I am thankful for the support of my family to allow me the luxury to realize my dream. Conventional wisdom suggests that doing everything for free generates nothing in return, but my experience tells me that it is far from the truth. There are many things which could not be bought and those are most valuable. Even if we must focus on money, my experience with licensing everything for on my Flickr stream for free via Creative Commons suggests otherwise. It is a bit hard to believe but I actually made money from my CC content because people who had the budget for photography for their projects ended up giving me credits and send me cheques for photo placement. It's crazy. Those who couldn't afford to pay will never be able to pay anyway so what does it matter?

In any case, I still do some freelance projects on the side if it's meaningful to me. Money is not a measure of value for me. I prefer bartering – which before the concept of money was invented was how people do business anyway. I also hope to spend half of my time in the next 10 years documenting the change of China through photography as showing Chinese culture in a positive light is important to me. I may not agree with everything that the Chinese government is doing, but as a Chinese, I am proud of my culture. Which is exactly why I don't have an English name. You need not agree with the politics, but the people, the culture and the arts are really spectacular. I also hope to meet the local artists in my journey, as I have seen some really interesting things happening in contemporary art in China.

So there you have it. I am in Hong Kong now because after connecting all the dots of what I did in my life, I think that I have found out what I love to do and I want to do exactly that – which interestingly was the same conclusion that Steve Jobs came to while he was still alive.

Update: 2012-10-15

If you wish to learn more about how Creative Commons indirectly helped me gain influence on the social web, check out this article recently written about me where a photograph which almost got deleted from my camera ended up being the most popular photo on my Flickr stream and in turn became synonymous with Twitter when it comes to journalism.

Storyful tips and tools: How Creative Commons helps creators and journalists

Good designs make you happy

Three sets of Cubitec units unpacked and shipped from New York in 2012

At first it might seem a lot to splurge $245 USD x3 on these puppies, but once you realized how durable and configurable they are, you will fall in love with them.

I bought 3 sets of Cubitec shelving units (designed by Tel Aviv designer Doron Lachisch b.1948) from Design Within Reach back in 2009 when I was still in New York. Now that I am in Hong Kong and the space is smaller, I am reconfiguring then into something else.

Well designed products appear simple at first and they make you ponder over the price-value ratio. But like a fine wine, good designs demonstrate through their beauty of functionality that they simply get better and better every year.

Cubitec shelves as configured in New York apartment. Pardon that mess!

The shelves are constructed with highly durable plastic. And as you can see, all three units fits perfectly inside my MeBox (another fine design example) – which is unfortunately no longer available for sale. Sure you can go to Ikea for some knock-offs, but what did those shelves you bought form 5 years ago look like now? My Cubitec looks brand new like the first day I bought it, and it continues to bring me joy everyday.

Highly recommended.

Diana Eng's Fairytale Fashion Collection Debut at Eyebeam NYC

The Fairytale Fashion Collection uses technology to create magical clothing in real life. Electronics, mechanical engineering, and mathematics are used to create clothing with blooming flowers, changing colors and transforming shapes.

I first learned about this project by Diana Eng (Twitter / Wikipedia) at Eyebeam's Open Studios last year. As a designer + technologist, I actively seek out people working on things that infuses art + science. And so when Diana told me that her collection's debut at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York, I was more than delighted to check her out.

The Collection

Research and development for the Fairytale Fashion collection are shared online at FairytaleFashion.org as an educational tool that teaches about science, math, and technology through fashion. Fairytale Fashion was created with the support of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, the leading not-for-profit art and technology center in the United States.

A total of nine looks were showcased on the runway on February 24th, 2010, and some of them will be available for purchase on March 1st at DianaEng.com.

1. EL Wire Dress. Aqua silk chiffon organically draped dress edge with electroluminescent wire controlled by an accelerometer. Circuit boards are housed in 3-D printed neck piece.

2. Deployable Hoodie. Red wood silk hoodie with Miura Ori structure pleat pattern to help the hood collapse small and open big.

3. Twinkle Dress and Twinkle Cardigan. LED circuits are hand embroidered with silverized thread and a custom sewable circuit board Twinkle Pad, developed specially for the Fairytale Fashion Collection. Twinkle Dress's removable grey silk chiffon twinkle pad circuit overlays washable black cotton American Apparel dreww. Twinkle Cardigan's removable black wool melton shoulder patches overlay a cotton sweater.

4. Cameo. Peach silk organza edged with electroluminescent wire. Circuit boards are housed in 3-D printed Cameo.

5. Twinkle Skirt. LED circuits are hand embroidered with silverized thread and a custom sewable circuit board Twinkle Pad, developed specially for the Fairytale Fashion Collection.

6. Puff Sleeve Jacket. Lavender cotton canvas jacket with deployable structure pleated sleeves.

7. Inflatable Dress. Cream silk chiffon, draped over plastic inflatables and white silk flowers.

8. EL Wire Coat. White silk organza illuminated by EL wire patterns beneath which are controlled by an accelerometer.

9. Floating Dreams Dress.

Circuit Bending Orchestra

In typical geek fashion, the music accompanying the show was no other than a circuit-bending orchestra made up of team members: Lara Grant, Sarah Grant, Peter Kirn and Matt Ganucheau.

In fact here's a video of Lara Grant explaining to me how this all works:

SML 720p HD Simulcast: Flickr / Vimeo / YouTube

About Diana Eng

Diana Eng is a fashion designer who specializes in technology, math, and science. Her designs range from inflatable clothing to fashions inspired by mechanical engineering. She is a designer from Bravo’s Emmy nominated TV show, Project Runway season 2 and author of Fashion Geek: Clothes, Accessories, Tech. Diana is cofounder of NYC Resistor hacker group. Diana is currently a resident artist at Eyebeam.

Extra, Extra!

Hilary Mason (Facebook / Twitter), a computer science professor with a background in machine learning, data mining, and web applications, tends the lighting control. She is currently on sabbatical to explore real-world implementations of these technologies.

Gadget Galore at the press section:

Twinkling Backstage. The backstage literally lights up because of all the electroluminescent wires and Twinkle Pads.

Last but not least, SML Me with Diana!

Merry Christmas + Happy New Year from the SML Universe / 2009 / SML Thank You

SML Universe wishes you MXHN:

SML Thank You for a great year

May your hopes and dreams be realized in the days to come!

Download source at http://github.com/seeminglee/smldata/tree/master/design/holiday/2009/
+ mxhn2009.ai (Adobe Illustrator CS4)
+ mxhn2009.svg (SVG 1.1)
+ mxhn2009.png (24-bit PNG 100x1000)

CC-BY-SA 2009 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

New York City Subway LED Signage

Update #1. Blogged by Michael Lebowitz: Nice - New York City Subway LED Signage (via @pyesawichjr). SML Thank You!
Update #2. Blogged by Inosthetics: New York City Subway Dynamic LED Signage. SML Thank You!

I was riding the M train last week and I spotted this new LED signage system. I am not sure how new they are as I have not seen them before, but then since I mostly travel on F train (or actually mostly cabs...), I don't know if these are really spanking new or just that I have not been riding on the line.

The photograph alone does not show how it is a superior improvement to the previous system, so I did a video of it to show you how it works:

New York City Subway Signage / 2009-09-23 / SML from See-ming Lee 李思明 SML on Vimeo.
This 720p HD Video is also on YouTube and Flickr.

The signage is split into two halves. On the left side of the panel shows where the train is at while the train is stopped (with a flashing bounding box), and when it's in motion, it displays the next stop. The name of the next 10 stops, in yellow, are displayed to the right of 'you are here sign post'. Each station name is accompanied with designation in green which shows the additional lines you can do an interchange. A red handicapped icon designate whether there it is a station equipped with accessibility access.

At the end of the right half of the panel shows the last stop of the train, and the LED displays loops through the rest of the stop in multiple of 10s, so you can get a glance of all the stops while keeping the display small enough so as not requiring an extra large panel for the longer lines.



This design is smart, efficient and very usable. I am very glad that MTA enlisted a clearly great design team for this project. When MTA upgraded the signage on the 4/5/6 a few years back, I thought that those signage is a nice upgrade but cannot imagine how flexible it can be when the map was essentially a static print-out. This new system not only is more efficient, but it makes it portable to any line without the need to upgrade the hardware. When new lines are introduced, it can quickly adapt to the new environment, so kudos to the design team, whoever you are!

Related SML
+ SML Pro Blog: Design
+ SML Pro Blog: Infographics
+ SML Pro Blog: Information Design
+ SML Pro Blog: New York

SML Thank You / 2009-09-25 / SML

Today is my birthday so naturally I am getting greetings all over the globe. This is my thank you card to all of you!



I am a believer in thanking people. As an ADHD-afflicted geek, I have often forgotten the kindness and generosity from others, and I make a point of recording them so I can search through them.

I started a blog called SML Thank You (http://thankyou.seeminglee.com) a while back but it was getting a bit challenging to maintain. It also become a bit insane to keep too many blogs so I have since imported them onto SML Pro Blog and labeled those items as SML Thank You.

I do think that thanking people is still an important activity, so I started tweeting with the prefix [SML Thank You] (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22SML%20Thank%20You%22) but then to save space I started using #smlthankyou as a suffix (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23smlthankyou).

But what about all those people I've thanked which did not appear on Twitter. I need to find those thanks, and perhaps in comments area on other places. So I built a Yahoo Pipe to do it:



There is a full description of all the different modules and what it is on SML Wiki: Yahoo Pipes: SML Thank You. In a gist, it does a search on the web and grab data from where I might have thanked folks and put them all in a single RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=a8dc3b5c3847f409e0c1f1d6bee13989&_render=rss.

A sample output looks like this:



and if you go to the Yahoo Pipe page at http://pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/smlthankyou you can also use the image view and the map view (for items with geo-data).

A sample output of the pipe and how it renders can be seen on SML Wiki: SML Thank You (http://wiki.seeminglee.com/sml-thank-you)

Related SML
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Graphic Design
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Pipes
+ SML Pipes
+ SML Pro Blog: SML Graphic Design
+ SML Pro Blog: SML Thank You
+ SML Pro Blog: Yahoo Pipes

Update 01: 2009-09-25
Since posted the design on Flickr, I noted that the 500x500 version does not really work as a comment to thank you, so I created a mini version for 'thumbnail' comment use. Thanks for visiting the blog! Here's my thankyou card just for you!

Welcome to Yale map featured on Smashing Magazine / SML Thank You

On September 11th, 2009, Smashing Magazine posted of blog post about Data Visualization and Infographics Resources. The map that I created in college intended to help freshmen navigating around New Haven when I was the photo editor / design editor at The Yale Herald back in 1997 was featured:


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Within two days, this relatively ancient artifact immediately got a quick boost and the expected long-tail to follow:


Smashing Magazine: Thank you for featuring me! Lots of SML Love to you!!!

Related SML
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Information Design
+ SML Pro Blog: SML Graphic Design
+ SML Pro Blog: Information Design
+ SML Pro Blog: Maps
+ SML Thank You

Facebook Network / 2009 / SML

Update 2009-10-14: The author of the program announced that the app is permanently shut down because of lack of resources to maintain it. They have published the source though. Get it while it's still up!

I revisited Nexus a week ago to check out how my Facebook network's topology has become now that I have made some new friends in the art and music scene. The interactive application is useful, but what interests me most is the forming of different clusters. Unfortunately, Nexus does not yet intelligently group these for you, so I took a screenshot of the result and did some visual mapping of the underlying cluster on Inkscape.


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The clusters are formed predominantly through the channel where I meet the folks:
+ Family and friends of family.
+ Sexual orientation: gay aka extended family.
+ Education: high school, college.
+ Professional: co-workers, clients, industry events.
+ Interests: art, music, photography.
+ Random: by chance meetings, dates, social networks like Flickr and Twitter.

What is important to note in this diagram is that it reveals the interconnectedness of relationships between your contacts.

Since I have spent a large part of my adult life working in interactive media in New York, most people that I know which forms the core of the diagram lies in the center of the graph. There is a separate cluster (green) which is fairly separate from the rest, from the network of friends living in Hong Kong.

There are interesting links moving from the interactive design world with the art and music world because it is not difficult to imagine the interconnectedness of the creative world. Some nodes do not connect with anyone else because I met them via social networks like Flickr and Twitter. These are folks I would not have met if not for those networks, so it is not hard to imagine that they likely would not have come in contact with the rest of my network universe either.

One feature that would have been nice is to see a time-lapse display of the graph changing over time.

The author of the program ludios on Flickr actually told me that he may implement an animated / temporal version of this program, but I guess he hasn't had time to get to that still after 17 months. :)

I don't really have time to hog in front of my computer to do screenshots of the program, but I did take some screenshots over time, so you can at least see the forming of the clusters. The image hosted on the Flickr contain notes if you wish to figure out where the clusters are forming (precisely the reason why I decided to map over it this time!)

2008-03-04: I just joined Facebook not too long before this so the hubs are mostly co-worker, but you will notice some fairly unconnected nodes, again, mostly from either being gay or people I met on Flickr.

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2008-04-16: 315 freinds. Small Hong Kong cluster on the right

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2009-01-11: the Hong Kong cluster is particularly pronounce in this one :)

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2009-09-01: same one as above so you can see the change

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Colophon
Created using Nexus with Facebook relationship data of See-ming Lee on 2009-09-01. Nexus is a Facbook network visualizer and can be found at nexus.ludios.net. Cluster mapping and infographics created using Inkscape.