The Freak Parade

I haven’t paid much attention to Google Charts so far, but I have enjoyed Stephen Few’s “Bullet Graphs.” A bullet graph is an extremely condensed sort of bar chart that shows the current value of a KPI, and various ranges such as unacceptable, acceptable and target, and an optional indicator line that can mean several things. Anyway, here is an example of a bullet chart (from wikipedia):

This blog post referenced below was referenced in Stephen Few’s blog this morning and describes the several easy steps required to create a bullet graph using the Google API. Being able to easily throw these things up, ad hoc, in any web page is pretty phenomenal, if you ask me. The image below is actually a Google Graph:

Here is the link to the guide:

DEALER DIAGNOSTICS » Blog Archive » Create Bullet Graphs with Google Charts in 7 Easy Steps

Here is a pretty awe inspiring demonstration of the power of raw CSS for rendering a website design. Why bother with more complicated skinning mechanisms when CSS can do it all?

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

Maybe not quite Photoshop, but a few light-years ahead of MS-Paint in case you need to crop and image or add transparency to something, or you want to see how various image transformations can be accomplished in .net…

Here is what looks to be a very powerful, open source icon editor. You never know when you’ll need one.