
Kurzgesagt Information Design - cpg
http://kurzgesagt.org
======
andrea_s
The infographics are really nice, but what's with the looming globe? This has
to be the most invasive and annoying piece of useless UX I've ever seen...
(note that two links in the fixed menu on the left send you to the same target
you'd reach by clicking the globe!).

Other than that, this is really cool...

~~~
coldnebo
Er, the visual design is cool, but there are a lot of little things wrong with
the info graphics. E.g. Showing Neanderthal to recorded history time range
with a satellite above the middle of such time range is artistically valid,
but misleading in information design and visualization.

Sometimes, the infographics are completely wrong. The "weird no time zone"
before the Big Bang is complete bullocks -- the whole page has built the
expectation of meaning in the relation of how much time has passed between
marks -- implying that the universe has existed for longer "with time" than
"without time", which is scientifically meaningless.

I'd like to like this site, but it makes strong data statements without citing
any sources and the visual design potentially misleads as much as it informs.

~~~
Svip
You should probably watch that video,[0] the narrator explains pretty decently
what is going on.

[0]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkV6IpV2Y0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XkV6IpV2Y0)

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Aeolus98
Their Youtube channel [0] is excellent, they really grab the attention of
someone young about a large variety of topics, and they really make you want
to keep watching their videos.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt](https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt)

~~~
Perseids
Also, in contrast to their website, their Youtube channel only contains
educational videos and no promotional material. They also have a German
channel [1], which unfortunately is not up to date with the English one,
though.

If you like this kind of dense educational videos I can recommend C.G.P.
Grey's [2], Crashcourse's [3] and Henry Reich's [4] channels.

I'm fascinated by this new avenue of educational material as it can provide
the best parts of both books and tv if done well: You can pause and play back
any parts you have difficulties to understand or want to think through more
thoroughly and you have the benefit of both visual and auditive information
channels in parallel. For example of the latter, take a look at this video [5]
- describing the same concept (expansion of the universe does not have a
center) in book would have been much more awkward. Also, the pure speed of the
videos makes them more entertaining than any TV show could, because TV has to
aim for the lowest common recognition speed at every time. E.g. [6] would
never be possible on a streaming media.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/KurzgesagtDE](https://www.youtube.com/user/KurzgesagtDE)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey](https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse](https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics](https://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics)
and
[https://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth](https://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth)

[5]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4c-gX9MT1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4c-gX9MT1Q)

[6]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O37yJBFRrfg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O37yJBFRrfg)

~~~
TheHippo
Same people that are making crashcourse: Sci Show
(www.youtube.com/user/scishow)

------
ctchocula
Edit: I was looking at the pictures rather than watching the video. The audio
explanation does give a fair treatment of the subject matter.

\---

It's a nice idea, but the pictures about ISIS are a bit disturbing. I think it
might be a good idea to stick with science and topics that aren't
controversial, because otherwise it seems a bit like propaganda. Maybe I'm not
used to viewing such media, but it feels like if you gave me a piece of text,
I could read it and decide for myself whether or not it makes valid arguments.

However if you give me a piece of art, you are basically telling me a story
whose validity I have no way of discerning (within the framework i.e. without
having to do extra research). Having (what I presume to be) the ISIS emblem
and a bunch of skulls around it seems like it's telling me "these guys bad",
"those guys good", which is a bit authoritative for my taste and feels like
it's from a dystopian classroom where we are told what to think. Everything is
black or white. You're either with us or against us. There is no room in such
a worldview for nuance. Perhaps this is a consequence of the medium, in which
case established science (as opposed to politics) would be the topic of
choice.

~~~
themartorana
"There is no room in such a worldview for nuance."

Not everything needs room nuance. It seems to be a theme is some places, HN
being one, where there is a need to not assign morality as fact. But at the
extremes, we are allowed to collectively decide something is good or bad as an
absolute, and agree that anyone that disagrees is disturbed in some way.

Slavery was wrong, all throughout history.

Hitler was evil.

I know the arguments for allowing space for nuance or the dangers of assigning
morality absolutely. Normally I agree. But sometimes, something is so close to
absolute that we can discard any margin of error, because it doesn't change
the conclusion.

We should almost always be careful to challenge or leave room for challenging
our preconceived notions. But sometimes, just sometimes, there really isn't a
need.

Edit: at least that's my opinion.

~~~
coldtea
> _Hitler was evil._

Evil is a religious idea. Hitler was a man, not some devil.

Those kind of after-the-fact statements are just cargo-cult that tend to
obscure real historical understanding. Even if one means it well ("if we all
repugned by such evil, we will avoid it") it doesn't work that way in actual
life, for it tends to stick to some people and events and ignore others.

One has to understand "evil" (historically) not just loath it, in order to
avoid it. And he has to place it in it's context and consider whether his side
was just as "evil".

Fact 1: Before there was an official war Hitler was quite beloved in the West
(including the USA), both as an ally against the communists and as an example
of a strong "man of the state" against the "enemy within" (leftists, unions,
liberals, etc). And they did know how he got in power and what his beliefs
were.

Fact 2: Hitler wasn't some lone evil guy who brainwashed a nation. Similar
ideas about the historical role of Germany, of the German people, etc,
including anti-semitism were held by many German people even before Hitler
became known, including prominent philosophers like Heidegger and Carl Smitt,
artists and so on.

Fact 3: Anti-semitism was ripe in the US too, as was tons of other kinds of
racism (not just against blacks. KKK was also against Hispanic, balkan, etc
immigrants). Hitler himself wrote that he took the idea of the concentration
camps from the US confinement of Native Americans (
[http://www.issuesandalibis.org/campsa.html](http://www.issuesandalibis.org/campsa.html)
\-- random reference to the first link I found, there are tons of works on
those camps you can look up).

Fact 4: Focusing just on some historical events (the Holocaust) misses the
bigger picture, of western powers holding BILLION of people as slaves in their
colonies, including millions of deaths, lynchings, official executions,
maimings and the like. The US didn't have colonies at the time, but they had
millions of blacks they brought to serve them.

Fact 5: People who consider Hitler evil (and why not!), leave the people who
dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities -- on men, women, chidren, babies,
elderly etc -- scot free. They even ignore that the Japanese were already
destitute and surrendering, and revert to their BS patriotically edited
"history" to justify something which was merely a live test for the weapon and
a "message" for the post-war times. Just an example -- one can find equally
horrible acts by the English, Belgian, French, etc, including the Japanese
themselves in China and Korea.

~~~
jotm
Leopold II of Belgium killed more people than Hitler. Somehow few people seem
to know this, maybe because it was ok to kill black people back then?

~~~
coldtea
> _Leopold II of Belgium killed more people than Hitler. Somehow few people
> seem to know this, maybe because it was ok to kill black people back then?_

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was alluding too. And tons of other colonial
crimes besides.

For example, they very day that the WWII ended, the French killed 20.000+
Algerians who demanded their freedom (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9tif_and_Guelma_massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9tif_and_Guelma_massacre)
).

------
KhalilK
The most astonishing part for me, is that those videos are made using Adobe
After Effects, the amount of effort and patience it takes to work with a
clusterfuck of shape layers and compositions is simply amazing! Kudos!

~~~
duncanawoods
Are there any svg based animation tools that you can recommend please? I crank
out SVG but I'd like to be animate it easily for little things like the gifs
on the Atom site.

[https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

~~~
KhalilK
Animatron[0] jumps to mind immediately, I hope it does the job.

0.[http://animatron.com/](http://animatron.com/)

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cpg
What I originally came across was the Ebola video [1], but now I see they have
more things in their excellent YouTube channel, as others pointed out.

I was mostly interested in was the presentation style, more than the somewhat
odd collection of topics (or their bias or lack of it).

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRv19gkZ4E0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRv19gkZ4E0)

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cirosantilli
I wish the website pages would load a bit faster.

