I was searching travel information of Taiwan for my parents and saw this image “Smiling Taiwan, Feel it! Love it!” by chance. I like it very much and thought it would be cool if I make one similar for my parents.
I started to try a few tools. Mosamic is good enough for my purpose. It is a free mosaic software which can be used to create mosaics of any image. It’s easy to use and I made my own image in a few minutes.
NCES Kids’ Zone – A handy and simple way to create graphs and charts, obviously it’s not for very complex statistical analysis.
draw.to allows you to draw anything quickly and share it easily on Twitter, Facebook, and email.
Web Resizer is a free online photo resizing tool. I came across this freeware after a colleague requested to manage lots of uploaded images in a LMS. Here is a detailed review from Mino Studio blog.
On many occasions, I need to create some visualised diagrams quickly to help people understand something.
A while ago, I was looking for a handy timeline generator and recently, I wanted to have a chart generator to create nice charts.
Borrowed the “Quick & Dirty” idea, I tried The Pie Chart Maker, Piecolor, and Interactivate pie chart. At last, I used Piecolor, a handy tool to create pie charts. It is not for complicate statistical data, but an easier way of presenting something. Comparing to some tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Piecolor is much easier.
Today, I have a sight of 22 Useful Online Chart & Graph Generators. A very useful sources for my later use.
I wanted to draw a simple and nice timeline the other day. However, it’s not easy when I didn’t have a drawing tool and some template could use.
I tried a quick way – Google any handy tools.
Smartdraw appeared on the top. It looks excellent. I downloaded it. Free trail but you cannot really create a very usable timeline. This version only allows you to create year spans before 2008.
I quickly tried a couple of online tools. Not so successful. Eventually, I tried the Timetoast. It’s easy to use, clear and simple. The only disappointing feature is that it does not show all events information in one screen. If I want to see all my events and timespans in one diagram, I have to use image editing tools to cut and re-form.
I prefer seeing statistical diagrams to spreadsheets. I suppose most people do.
Many Eyes, a SaaS offered via Cognos and IBM, allows pure data in either text or table format to be uploaded and processed into multiple visualisation formats. Like the diagram such as Where Most Students Study Higher Education in Wales and HE Wales – Subjects.
Other resources:
Photo to cartoon effects converters:
befunky provides a free limited-functionality photo to cartoon converter that allows people to create some beautiful and creative pictures out of normal pictures into cartoon effects.
Bubblesnaps is allow you add speech bubbles to a picture, for instance, pictures here.
Cartoonatic is a free application for recording animated videos right on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Convert to Cartoon is a free web-based application that allows you to convert any photo and picture on cartoon effect.
Dumper is web-based photo to cartoon converter that offers you pencil sketch cartoons of your original pictures.
Image Embellisher is an online tool that can apply special effects to images.
Kuso Cartoon is free online photo to cartoon converter (beta) that offers you fast and simple way to convert photos to cartoon effects images.
Oddcast 3D PhotoFace technology allows you to create realistic 3D likenesses from a single uploaded image. See demo here.
Pho.to site offers a number of online services for photo editing, photo fun and sharing.
Zoom.it is a free service for viewing and sharing high-resolution imagery. It converts your image to the Deep Zoom format, which lets you smoothly and efficiently explore the whole image, no matter how large.
GIMPShop is a free Open Source image editor that is similar to the popular Adobe Photoshop. Specifically GIMPShop is a version of the GIMP that has been edited to be more user-friendly for Photoshop users. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
I don’t know too much about data visulisation. However, I like to see the data/information being presented by graphics as “each image tells a story”. Run a search and got some free tools for data visulisation. I may need to use them later.
Other resources:
Web n' Circle 