traveled a long way back home

By Deirdre Fulton Common Dreams The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity set global systems on a different trajectory   The Anthropocene Epoch has begun, according to a group of experts assembled at the … Continue reading →

By UC Santa Barbara News A new study from UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis finds kelps are doing better than other key coastal ecosystem-forming species Like all marine ecosystems around the world, kelp forests are threatened by … Continue reading →

By Susan Bales Courtesy of Children & Nature Network Some years ago, I worked as a “nature lady” at a Y camp in the San Bernardino Mountains above Los Angeles. Urban kids who had no experience in nature came to … Continue reading →

By The National Parks Conservation Association In 2016, to celebrate the National Park Service centennial, 150 people experienced the wondrously dark night skies of Mojave National Preserve. Since 2008, these bi-annual star parties — courtesy of NPCA, Mojave National Preserve, … Continue reading →

By University of British Columbia Many people choose organic thinking it’s better for humans and the planet, but a new UBC study published today in Science Advances finds that might not always be the case. “Organic is often proposed a … Continue reading →

By Brett Israel UC Berkeley News Elemental sulfur, the most heavily used pesticide in California, may harm the respiratory health of children living near farms that use the pesticide, according to new research led by UC Berkeley. In a study … Continue reading →

WildEarth Guardians Press Release Federal Court Overturns Leasing of Lands to Oil and Gas Industry SANTA FE, NM — In a victory for New Mexico’s air, climate, and water, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico today … Continue reading →

By Nate Seltenrich Environmental Health Perspectives Human impacts on our planet have become so profound that many researchers now favor a new name for the current epoch: the Anthropocene.1 The underlying premise of this term is that essentially every Earth … Continue reading →

Our new website has been launched today. We hope you enjoy our new server!

CBD is being talked about everywhere. With more and more sources reporting the benefits of CBD in supporting health and wellness, comes a lot of myths, confusion, and misinformation. In order to educate the public about CBD, Diamond CBD has launched the “I am CBD, I am THC” video series nationwide. The national CBD educational […]

The post I am CBD, I am THC Video Series a Successful Storytelling Example appeared first on Snap2objects.

Life as a designer can be very stressful and fill your life with stress and tension, you can treat without naturally and without damaging your health. When stress situations reach us, sometimes we feel so anxious that We try to reduce it on our own, such as self-medication, but in the long run, this can […]

The post 5 Ways to Reduce Stress Naturally appeared first on Snap2objects.

Whether you want to make it as a graphic designer or work in an up-and-coming tech company, the world of technology offers some of the best job prospects of any field in the world. It is very fast-paced but has outgrown the days where you did not need a degree to master the field – […]

The post The 5 Best Degrees for Job Prospects in Tech appeared first on Snap2objects.

Building a business is a long and difficult process. It’s a time filled with uncertain ups and downs – so you need all the support and advice you can get, even if it’s not your first time creating a successful money-making business.  So, here are eight things you should consider, which you might not have […]

The post Eight Things to Consider when Building a Business appeared first on Snap2objects.

Starting a small business is a different kind of career move, since you don’t need to have any educational achievements to get started. Unlike applying for employed job roles, where employers might state the degrees or other qualifications that they expect candidates to have, anybody can start their own small business, even if you dropped […]

The post How a Business Degree Can Help Business Owners Succeed appeared first on Snap2objects.

Starting an SEO campaign in 2022 can be a daunting task. Many SEO landscapes are highly competitive, SEO campaigns take a long time to gain returns, and many different types of optimization can be done. But don’t worry, we’re here to help! This guide will give you all the information you need to get your […]

The post The Complete 2022 Guide to Search Engine Optimization appeared first on Snap2objects.

For software companies competing in today’s digital marketplace, simply having an online presence isn’t enough. To capture the attention of your target audience and engage them throughout your sales funnel, you need to develop and deploy a strategic, comprehensive, and consistent digital marketing plan. Digital marketing is not just about visibility — it’s about establishing […]

The post The Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for B2B Software Companies appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

Introducing a comprehensive guide that dispels the notion of being restricted to a local web design company and instead encourages you to embrace the boundless potential of a global approach to website design. Covering everything from design trends to search engine optimization and user testing, we delve into every aspect of the contemporary web design […]

The post Navigating Web Design Around Me: Unveiling Digital Horizons appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

“They say you have to spend money to make money,” goes the saying, and nowhere is this more relevant than in the digital landscape. As businesses continue to vie for consumer attention online, Google has steadily shifted its strategy, prioritizing search ads over organic results. If you’ve been observing your website’s organic ranking take a […]

The post Why Invest in Digital Advertising: The Path to Explosive Growth and ROI appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

Digital marketing is an essential part of how today’s tech companies reach customers. A tailored digital marketing strategy can provide high value content to potential customers while also demonstrating the need and effectiveness of your offerings. This article dives into the importance of digital marketing for tech companies and the most important tactics and platforms […]

The post Transforming Tech with Digital Marketing: Gaining a Competitive Edge appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

Today’s tech firms need a solid digital marketing strategy to stand out and remain competitive in the eyes of potential customers. Tech businesses can use many tactics, channels, and communication styles to reach key decision-makers and sell more products or services. So, effective marketing strategies for tech companies must include an intentional combination of these […]

The post Building a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy for B2B Tech Firms appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

A carefully planned and executed search engine optimization campaign is critical to most technology businesses’ overall digital marketing strategy. Technology companies, in particular, require a different approach to SEO than many others. They often face a highly technical target audience, prospects who thoroughly research possible solutions before making a buying decision, multiple stakeholders in the buying process, […]

The post Advanced SEO Tactics for B2B Technology Companies appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

Launching a new B2B software product requires a different approach than traditional go-to-market strategies. The business model you choose should align with varying types of products and market conditions, as it significantly influences overall sales success and the structuring of sales teams. The software space is crowded, and your potential customers are likely already using […]

The post From Research to Revenue: A Complete Guide to B2B Software GTM appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

Zach Rottman dealt with the stress of his son bringing home “bugs” from daycare by creating a table on how often the individuals of the household were sick. There are a bunch of advantages you can get from tracking “quantified self” data with visualizations, and I can appreciate this one about kids bringing home sickness from school. Not the kind of homework parents want to be dealing with.

My boy started school, my boy got sick.

As any parent could have told me, we got clobbered. Within three days, my son had Covid, and while he was only mildly sick for a day or two, he (and I) stayed home for ten. Meanwhile, my partner was out of commission for longer than that. Scarcely a week after his return our son brought home some gnarly cold—home again, not sleeping, not eating. Turns out, it’s especially hard to manage a head cold when you don’t know how to blow your nose yet and have a strong and very vocal preference against medicine. The next time it was hand, foot, and mouth disease, then RSV, followed by a slew of mysterious rashes. You get the idea. Most of the time mommy and daddy didn’t fare much better.

So, to distract me from my misery and take on a project that could plausibly be brought to fruition while also tending to a sick one-year-old, I started quantifying the sick days and built a simple web app (myboyissick.com) to see it all.

I do think the rows of 12 squares aren’t easily translatable to days or weeks on the calendar. Not a big deal when you’re designing just for yourself, but I would layout the grid to be more relatable to a calendar format.

Article found on Nightingale.

Listen to Wikipedia is a fun visual & audio project that gives life to real-time edits on Wikipedia.

For the visualization, green circles are anonymous edits, purple circles are bots, and white circles are edits by registered users. The size of the circles represent the size (in bytes) of the edit made.

Fro the audio portion, bells are additions and string plucks are subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.

Listen to Wikipedia was written by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, and is open-source. [Github link] This project was built using D3 and HowlerJS. You can read more about their project in their blog post.

The 2023 Women’s World Cup Flags infographic from UK Featherflags takes a currently popular topic in the news, and makes it relevant to the publishers business of making flags. This is the content they know about best.

From the publisher:

[This infographic] takes a look at the flags for the different countries in the 2023 FIFA women's world cup which is taking place from 20 July to 20 August 2023 and is jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand.

Check out this handy design to view the flags for the countries in the various groups of the tournament along with some interesting facts.

I like the simple infographics that tell one story really well. Not a lot fo text, and the flag images are the highlight of the infographic design. I love that they included the URL to the infographic landing page in the footer! Many people will share or repost an infographic without providing a link back to the original. This makes it easy for readers to track down the source and learn more if they were interested.

This design is missing a few things:

• I prefer to include the publisher’s logo on the infographic somewhere (usually in the footer). This only mentions the publisher’s website in text as part of the subtitle. It’s easy to miss, and that loses the publisher’s benefit of releasing the infographic in the first place.

• It’s missing some type of conclusion or call-to-action at the end. What should readers do after reading the infographic? It doesn’t have to be a hard sales pitch. Visit the website, sign up for our newsletter, learn more about flags on our site, etc. What action should the reader take after enjoying the infographic?

• Copyright or Creative Commons license.

Thanks to David for submitting the infographic!

Sankey and Alluvial Diagram Tools is a new directory page I just added to the growing library Cool Infographics Tools pages. The page has links to many free and paid tools to create your own diagrams. I’ve included online tools, programming code and downloadable apps.

This will be a growing list as more tools become available, so feel free to send me a note if you know of a tool that I should consider adding to the list!

Bard Vs ChatGPT infographic by Zealous System breaks down the specifics and differences between the two AI language models.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is based on GPT-3.5 architecture and has become a leading AI language model, renowned for its ability to generate human-like text and provide insightful responses. On the other hand, BARD, a language model equipped with advanced natural language understanding and generation capabilities, makes it a formidable competitor in the market.

ChatGPT is better at generating creative text formats, such as poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc. It is also better at generating different responses to the same prompt, which can make it more engaging to interact with. However, ChatGPT is not as good at answering factual questions as Bard.

Bard is better at answering factual questions, summarizing text, and providing information from the real world. It is also better at following instructions and completing requests thoughtfully. However, Bard is not as good at generating creative text formats as ChatGPT.

This is a fairly general informative infographic design. No specific point, or push to use one over the other. Good information as a comparison infographic using the publicly available information about each tool (which there is very little specific data).

The footer should include some type of copyright (or Creative Commons) license and the URL to get to the infographic landing page (not just the company home page).

Thanks to Mary Logan for the submission!

Vizion Online created a Timeline of Reddit to give a better understanding of the platform.

Most of us have come across Reddit at some point but what do we really know about this hugely popular social networking platform?

It was conceived in America in 2005 as a news forum where it became popular with prominently a younger well educated profile, sharing topics, links and images, allowing users and communities to comment on each post.

Reddit has grown to be a prevalent news forum where members vote on content giving them ratings. Although Reddit is considered a social media platform it is a unique network centred around communities and subgroups known as subreddits.

Throughout its history, there has been a number of high-profile stories including activist protest and political coverage.

We have created this infographic to give a better understanding of the platform using a timeline of key events throughout the history of Reddit.

Personally, I don’t like timelines designed this way. I prefer to see the events spaced out chronologically to match an actual timeline instead of each event equally spaced. If three events happen in the same year, I would list them in the same box. Only one box per year.

Found on Vizion Online

I really like this Sankey Diagram explanation of the numbers behind one of this year’s hottest political topics in the U.S.: How to Fix America’s Immigration Crisis. The original article adds a scrolly-telling element that makes it even better by slowly revealing each branch and explaining the data.

I know this article is hidden behind the NY Times paywall. If you’re not a NY Times subscriber you can try to view the original article with this LINK or try using reader mode on your browser. Let me know if this link doesn’t work, and I’ll try to post a new one.

The Quickest Route to Washington DC is a GIS visualization from @ArterialMapping (also known as MattMDL on reddit)

From @ArterialMapping:

How was this map completed? Well, using @Esri ArcGIS Pro Network Analysis toolset! In general terms, there were 4 steps:

1. Created a dot grid for the whole of the continental U.S. This grid is what enables the routes to be created to D.C. A dot was also created for D.C.

2. Run Network Analysis to find the shortest route to D.C. from each dot.

3. Run a calculation for the number of overlapping routes (shown as the stronger strokes on the roadways)

4. Then, of the 4 main spokes I saw, I copied them over into their own layers and colored them accordingly.

Red generally follows I-70 to I-270, Green generally follows I-81 to I-66, Blue generally follows I-95 south of D.C., Orange generally follows I-95 north of D.C.

Pin Point: The Most Common 4-digit PIN numbers by Information is Beautiful was a redesign of Nick Berry’s original work. Having a pin that’s easy for you to remember, could also be an easy one to guess. Check out this infographic and see how safe your favorite PIN may be.

Chip and PIN card, phone passcode, hotel safe – how predictable is your chosen PIN number?

3.4 million data points visualized from several data breaches.

Created by the late great Nick Berry of Data Genetics (redesigned and used with permission). He wrote a great data story around this which is also worth a read.

I really like this heatmap. Visually, it reveals a number of insights from the data:

• The diagonal line shows the PINs where two digits are repeated to create a 4-digit PIN. 1111, 3434, 5050, etc.

• The lower left corner is brighter with PINs starting with low numbers, generally representing dates. The section goes to the right up to the number 31, representing the day. Birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

• There is a bright horizontal line of PINs starting with “19” the wraps into a line starting with “20”, representing a year that someone has chosen for some significance. Birth year, wedding, graduation, etc.

• The black squares are the least used PIN numbers, also listed at the bottom of the infographic.

Found on Information is Beautiful.

How Long Can People Cover Their Needs Without Income? infographic by Visual Capitalist.

How Long Can People Cover Their Needs Without Income?

With nearly half of people under 34 worldwide unable to cover their needs for a month or less without income, it is no surprise that financial resiliency is a hot topic.

So, for this graphic, Visual Capitalist has partnered with Lloyd’s Register Foundation to explore economic resilience further and determine how long the average person can afford to cover their needs without income.

World Risk Poll 2024 Report: Economic Resilience

Lloyd’s Register Foundation produces the World Risk Poll every two years in partnership with Gallup, and the World Risk Poll 2024 report explores the everyday risks of 147,000 people from 142 nations.

They asked respondents how long they could afford to cover basic needs, such as food, transport, and shelter, if they lost all income. 

The results reveal a distinct trend across all age groups, with respondents typically falling into two categories: those with one month or less of financial runway, and those with more than four months. Relatively fewer respondents reported being able to survive two to three months.

I think this is a really interesting adaptation of a Sankey/Alluvial diagram. I’d like to see summaries of each timeframe to support their discussion around trends.

Found on Visual Capitalist.

There are many reasons why you may want to organize WordPress photos, or change the order of your photography store’s products. You can attention to older products, or increase conversions by showcasing popular items more prominently. Unfortunately, by default, changing the published date of each product is the only way to adjust the order of products in […]

Cloud storage has become immensely popular, especially for hosting hefty files such as images and video. There are numerous benefits to storing your content on a dedicated server, and for offering downloads that are both consistently quick and secure, cloud storage is vital. We’ve developed our Sell Media plugin to help you sell images and video on your WordPress website – and by […]

Are you one of the 55% of people globally who watch online videos every single day? Video has become an incredibly popular format for consuming content, and it’s now as ubiquitous as images within our social media news feeds and timelines. Despite this, the ability to sell videos online is difficult than many other forms of static media – […]

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could sell photo subscription plans to your own stock website, just like the big boys at iStockPhoto? In less than one month, you’ll be able to do just that! Our new subscription extension for Sell Media will allow you to: Create up to 10 monthly and yearly subscription plans. Set download limits […]

Like any creative medium, web design passes through fashionable design trends that make their mark before slowly fading back into obscurity. However, there’s one design trend (much like a little black dress or wayfarer sunglasses) that never goes out of style: minimalism. Rather than distract users by bombarding them with flashy animations and eye-catching designs, […]

Setting up a trouble-free payment process can be nerve-wracking. It must be completely secure and fully tested before going live in order to give the customer zero problems and total confidence in their purchase. Any issues with the checkout process, and it could end up with a potential refund to the customer, or no sale at all. Sell Media incorporates a testing […]

Converting website visitors into subscribers may be even harder than getting traffic in the first place. The key to customer retention is the ability to grow an engaged audience. It’s a constant struggle to maintain interest, and if you can’t convert casual visitors into loyal customers you may as well close the virtual shutters. If you’re […]

Say hello to Composition, our new multipurpose WordPress theme that has all the right ingredients for building any kind of website. What is a Multipurpose WordPress Theme? Simply put, a multipurpose WordPress theme is designed with maximum flexibility in mind. This means that you can use Composition for a wide range of websites including ones for Businesses, Portfolios, […]

Wedding Photography is a tough business. You collaborate with people who are expecting to see passion and love reflected in your work, people who want to see every precious moment captured beautifully. There are no do-overs on wedding day, and the pressure can be enormous. Kate Williams, who works primarily a wedding photographer but also does stunning portraiture, […]

Back in October 2015, Google announced the launch of a project that may change the internet forever. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project makes static pages and images load faster than ever before, and despite the youth of the project, big names like Pinterest, WordPress, and Twitter have all voiced their support. For photography website owners, the […]