If you get nostalgic for wild hair, fashion risks, synthesizers, and the days when music still came on vinyl, check out this site featuring several hundred 80s music videos.

I recently discovered an clever idea known as “Sparklines“. Sparklines are “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics” and the concept was developed by Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale University who specializes in the presentation of informational graphics.

I am particularly fond of anything related to the role of symbols in communication and this immediately caught my eye. I have written the following paragraph to demonstrate one use of sparklines.

A web developer must consider the popularity of web browsers when designing a web site to ensure the widest audience will be able to access the site’s content effectively. Internet Explorer won the first browser war with Netscape and remained unchallenged and unchanged for several years. A relatively new web browser called Firefox has put Microsoft on guard. Over the last year Firefox has been able to exceed 25% market share. You can see in red each month that Firefox has had higher than 25% market share since January 2005.

After several years of dormancy in the browser space, Microsoft has literally apologized and released IE7 (Beta 2). It is interesting to watch the adoption rate of a new browser, therefore I have prepared some statistics on three well known browsers.

• Internet Explorer 7 adoption has been steady with a low of .2% in January and a high of 1.1% in May of this year.
• Firefox has had its ups and downs but has increased from 16.6% in January 2005 to 25.7% in May of this year.
• Netscape 7 never really got off the ground and is at its lowest mark to date. Its highest market share was 1.6% in November of 2003. Currently only .3% of web users are browsing with Netscape.

It will be interesting to see if IE7 can pull market share from the loyal following that Firefox has for good reasons already engendered.

As you can see, sparklines offer a quick intuitive look at information by embedding it compactly within the text itself.

These are simple examples that are utilizing the code written by Eric W. Bachtal. Eric’s code is a .NET implementation of the Python CGI program developed by Joe Gregorio. These guys have made it very easy to incorporate different sparkline graphs into your web site. Just assemble an image source tag with data points and instructions and the “web service” will create and return the graph.

Here is a simple example:

img title="IE7 adoption rate" xsrc="http://www.elexicon.com/sparkline.ashx?type=smooth&d=0,3,4,5,9
&height=15&min-color=red&max-color=blue&step=10&max-m=true&min-m=true&scale=true"  

There is a lot of potential here. Bissantz has some clever and attractive implementations of sparklines for Microsoft Office and the web.

Sparklines are a nice tool to consider for densely representing data. Using them inline with text or in mobile applications, where screen space is limited, can be an effective way to give the user a little more help decifering and remembering the content you are trying to communicate.

Zach turned us all on to Homestarrunner.com late last year and now we’re all huge fans, including my kids. The Homestar site is difficult to explain, so go ahead, check it out and enjoy: http://www.homestarrunner.com

My take is that this totally absurd, completely hilarious site is a great example of how creativity can thrive on the web, where there are none of the “linear” or “analog” barriers of traditional media.

The world of Homestar and “Strongbad” is as expansive as it is strange, with lots of “easter eggs” and hilarious little features that you couldn’t pull off in any other media. For example, “Strongbad E-Mails” are a highlight of the site — little five minute episodes that couldn’t be packaged any other way but on the web. Whoever thought such inspiration and entertainment could come from a marshmallow-man with a serious underbite and no arms?

As part of an ongoing effort to develop useful, unique, and interesting things in Flash, I have built two new applications called SketchTracer and Illumination&Levitation.  You can read more about them and test them out by clicking on either link. 

Please don’t hesitate to comment on these Flash apps… I’d like to know what you think of them!