Interesting (SSOL) stuff 2

While I'm not sharing these with my students anymore (yahoo for summer!), I'm still finding good stuff that I'm tucking away in my personal files. Here's a sampling of sites that made me SSOL (say "sweet!" out loud):

The Big Picture

Part of the Boston Globe's online space, The Big Picture posts amazing high quality images of recent events.
Particular posts I found moving/incredible/inspiring:

Typography as art

I only recently realized there's this culture of utilizing typography in a wide variety of artistic ways. Some of my favorites:

Kinetic typography

The art of using spoken text to create animated text which extends, adds to, or changes your perception of the original text.

Who's on First?

V is for Vendetta

Typographic animation

This short animated video utilizes only letters, numbers, and symbols right off the keyboard to tell its story.

Death and Taxes

I just ran across this yesterday thanks to BoingBoing.net. It's a graphical depiction of the United States federal discretionary budget (i.e. where you income taxes go). Incredibly detailed yet incredible to look at, it's quick way to visualize the priorities of the government based upon how they fund the various departments. You can zoom and pan around the image at their site to get a better look. If you really like it, you can buy it as a 24-inch by 36-inch poster (that's roughly 61-cm by 91-cm for those world citizens out there).

Wow! SSOL!