Data visualization is the newest thing that exists today in Information Design and through it you can synthesize a large group of information, resulting in an interactive interface, complex, yet aesthetic and informational.

The structure of my site is all in Drupal and it’s with this CMS that I add and edit posts, coordinate comments, tags and control the indexing on Google. Also the presentation is all in Flash and Flex, which is a framework made in ActionScript for optimizing the production, simplifying complex things as modular structure, localization and internationalization used in a web application.

Nowadays, Tag Clouds are a must-have tool in any site and sometimes it can be better than search. Of course, I needed one here too, so I adapted Roy Tanck’s WP-Cumulus to Flex and also edited it a bit, because I’m using Drupal as CMS and I’d like to have a different algorithm to generate my XML.

When working in Flash/Flex with idioms that have characters others than those that exist in english you'll need to work a little more. Whatever it is, a so different idiom as japanese, with its three distinct alphabets,  or only to include accentuation in latin languages.

When you create a swf, Flash or Flex automatically embed the characters of your static text with the font you choose, increasing the size of your final file. However, when you use dynamic text (coming from database, XML, user's input or rotated and deformed text) the problem with alphabets appears.

Actually, it's a pokan, which combines a lot with watercolor because even the taste is a bit watery :)

It took me 4 hours to do this watercolor painting in the teacher Ana's course, at the Gallery Da Color de Floripa in June 2008. It was my third day on the course and Ana gave me great tips.

Sketches

This is the first drawing, done by hand observing a pokan which I already had at home:

I'm very excited about flex and the possibility of him interact (even being a complicated way) with swf done in Flash. As I began in Flash, I felt a bit out of water in Flex, but now I have a little know-how and decided to post some tips for those who are thinking about migration, or to explore, or to know exactly what is Flex.