The Visual Driver; promoting clarity and coherence

Drawing from a research-based case study for a vision support charity, this professional paper articulates the role of a 'visual driver' as a key tool in shaping a rebranding. The 'visual driver' is a visual-based rubric of nine subjects, each with an image critically selected to capture the personality and essence of an entity. The paper discusses challenges around identifying the subtleties of a brand, how it behaves, its world outlook, its tone of voice. All difficult to define. However, once established, the designer’s journey towards creating a successful brand with personality becomes clear. Furthermore, the participatory nature of the 'visual driver' rubric – as it passes between designer and client, communicates early ideation as well as initiating an informed dialogue between multiple parties. The flexibility, accessibility and the participatory nature of this method are especially critical when working alongside clients with sensory impairments. The case study within the paper demonstrates the flexibility of the ‘Visual Driver’ to incorporate textures which enhance the effectiveness of the tool for an organisation dealing with visual impairment. The paper articulates how the 'visual rubric' enables designers to work collaboratively with clients, comparing their creative thinking and ensuring a better awareness and understanding of the brand challenges from client and end-user perspectives. Increasingly, developing a modern brand strategy demands a multiplicity of additional sensory feedback— aural, touch sonic etc. The paper concludes by presenting and discussing how a multisensory 'visual driver' was used to facilitate a rebrand

X-Ray Wakes in Abell 160

`Wakes' of X-ray emission have now been detected trailing behind a few (at least seven) elliptical galaxies in clusters. To quantify how widespread this phenomenon is, and what its nature might be, we have obtained a deep (70 ksec) X-ray image of the poor cluster Abell 160 using the ROSAT HRI. Combining the X-ray data with optical positions of confirmed cluster members, and applying a statistic designed to search for wake-like excesses, we confirm that this phenomenon is observed in galaxies in this cluster. The probability that the detections arise from chance is less than 0.0038. Further, the wakes are not randomly distributed in direction, but are preferentially oriented pointing away from the cluster centre. This arrangement can be explained by a simple model in which wakes arise from the stripping of their host galaxies' interstellar media due to ram pressure against the intracluster medium through which they travel.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Visualization techniques to aid in the analysis of multi-spectral astrophysical data sets

This report describes our project activities for the period Sep. 1991 - Oct. 1992. Our activities included stabilizing the software system STAR, porting STAR to IDL/widgets (improved user interface), targeting new visualization techniques for multi-dimensional data visualization (emphasizing 3D visualization), and exploring leading-edge 3D interface devices. During the past project year we emphasized high-end visualization techniques, by exploring new tools offered by state-of-the-art visualization software (such as AVS3 and IDL4/widgets), by experimenting with tools still under research at the Department of Computer Science (e.g., use of glyphs for multidimensional data visualization), and by researching current 3D input/output devices as they could be used to explore 3D astrophysical data. As always, any project activity is driven by the need to interpret astrophysical data more effectively

The dynamics of Abell 2634

We have amassed a large sample of velocity data for the cluster of galaxies Abell 2634 which contains the wide-angle tail (WAT) radio source 3C 465. Robust indicators of location and scale and their confidence intervals are used to determine if the cD galaxy, containing the WAT, has a significant peculiar motion. We find a cD peculiar radial velocity of 219 plus or minus 98 km s(exp -1). Further dynamical analyses, including substructure and normality tests, suggest that A 2634 is an unrelaxed cluster whose radio source structure may be bent by the turbulent gas of a recent cluster-subcluster merger

No need to justify your choice: pre-compiling line breaks to improve eBook readability

Implementations of eBooks have existed in one form or another for at least the past 20 years, but it is only in the past 5 years that dedicated eBook hardware has become a mass-market item. New screen technologies, such as e-paper, provide a reading experience similar to those of physical books, and even backlit LCD and OLED displays are beginning to have high enough pixel densities to render text crisply at small point sizes. Despite this, the major element of the physical book that has not yet made the transition to the eBook is high-quality typesetting. The great advantage of eBooks is that the presentation of the page can adapt, at rendering time, to the physical screen size and to the reading preferences of the user. Until now, simple first-fit linebreaking algorithms have had to be used in order to give acceptable rendering speed whilst conserving battery life. This paper describes a system for producing well-typeset, scalable document layouts for eBook readers, without the computational overhead normally associated with better-quality typesetting. We precompute many of the complex parts of the typesetting process, and perform the majority of the ‘heavy lifting’ at document compile-time, rather than at rendering time. Support is provided for floats (such as figures in an academic paper, or illustrations in a novel), for arbitrary screen sizes, and also for arbitrary point-size changes within the text

Reflowable documents composed from pre-rendered atomic components

Mobile eBook readers are now commonplace in today’s society, but their document layout algorithms remain basic, largely due to constraints imposed by short battery life. At present, with any eBook file format not based on PDF, the layout of the document, as it appears to the end user, is at the mercy of hidden reformatting and reflow algorithms interacting with the screen parameters of the device on which the document is rendered. Very little control is provided to the publisher or author, beyond some basic formatting options. This paper describes a method of producing well-typeset, scalable, document layouts by embedding several pre-rendered versions of a document within one file, thus enabling many computationally expensive steps (e.g. hyphenation and line-breaking) to be carried out at document compilation time, rather than at ‘view time’. This system has the advantage that end users are not constrained to a single, arbitrarily chosen view of the document, nor are they subjected to reading a poorly typeset version rendered on the fly. Instead, the device can choose a layout appropriate to its screen size and the end user’s choice of zoom level, and the author and publisher can have fine-grained control over all layouts