I love these food truck illustrations from New York Magazine. They not only make me hungry for some gyoza from Rickshaw, they make me glad to be a subscriber. There’s a lot of reasons out there for a print magazine to be cutting costs wherever they can, so it’s great to see them putting the extra dime into details like this. I totally want these as a series of vinyl toys.

I’ve been messing around a bit lately with Processing, an open source programming language for visualization (among other things). It’s been a lot of fun, mostly because it strikes the right balance for me between making visual art and tinkering around with math and logic. I like the way that writing in Processing feels like the programming equivalent of drawing in a sketchbook. You can pretty quickly put together something visually interesting, and then iterate it into something more complex as you go.

My first finished project in Processing was a visualization of traffic coming to all of Situation’s client sites on a given day, based on data from Google Analytics. There were a lot of fun challenges in putting this together, like wrangling the analytics data into a format I could use, figuring out how to match the coordinates to the projection used by the map I had, and (most exciting for me) creating the simple “throw” physics for when you drag the map around. I was helped along quite a bit by the excellent tutorials on the Processing site and by the amazing community of other Processing sketchers. The whole project came together over a long weekend. Check out the video below or click here to download the finished application.