Sometimes in order to study, it’s a good idea to take a look at a 3D version. Sometimes 3D diagrams are expensive, and only available in science labs. That’s where Origami Organelles come in!
Printable, hands-on and easy to assemble, you can study in a new way.
Make your own printable origami here
This is a gorgeous chart of all the Birds of North America. Each bird is designed with just enough color and shape to describe each individual bird species; a reasonable decision made by the artists of popchartlab.com that I completely agree with. Why make unnecessary details of each bird, when you know you have so many to make?! If you look at all of their work on their website, reduction is also their style, but that also means that this daunting project is not their only one. For some artists, it is a challenge to not get into detail; it’s so temping to describe each specimen with as much information as you can get. But sometimes it’s not necessary, and in this instance, it certainly works for me. The overwhelming amount of birds themselves is enough detail (not to mention fitting them together in a Golden Ratio-type layout). I hope the team at popcharlab.com continues to create more taxonomy-styled posters like this one.
Buy the chart here:
https://www.popchartlab.com/products/birds-of-north-america
On the other hand, some artists must prevail with detail. And who else is more successful at creating exquisitely detailed, ornithological illustrations other than Jane Kim? The science illustrator who painted the Wall of Birds at Cornel University. Of course, it is the detail that makes her work so stunning. She takes care to paint every light and shadow of every feather and in the correct direction, all the while making sure every detail works harmoniously.
Jane Kim: www.ink-dwell.com
Either extreme is completely reasonable when it comes to taking on a task like illustrating 200+ birds. It is true that you can still create successful pieces of work no matter how much detail.
Viral internet videos have no bias. If something is interesting, then it is exactly that and people can’t help but watch and share. It’s now known that one sure way of getting information, i.e. scientific information, to the rest of the world is by creating lively and enticing videos. The popular “white board” animations have been on the internet for a while, which have allowed many to create their own interpretations. Although, like most things on the internet, some are more successful than others. It deems worth it to find out what those differences are.
AsapSCIENCE is a very popular blog (almost 7 Million subscribers) written by Mitchel Moffit (@mitchellmoffit) and Gregory Brown (@whalewatchmeplz). So popular in fact, that Mr. Bill Nye himself, is featured in some of their videos. It’s no wonder he’s in them, since these videos have a clever way of creeping science literacy into the popular eye via social media. Each video is easy to watch, quick, and entertainging live white-board drawings. Not only are they fun to watch visually, but they are usually about a familiar and curious phenomenon; the things almost all of us have thought about, and yet, we may still haven’t investigated it for ourselves (hence hankering to our curiosity). And the great thing is, AsapSCIENCE tells us what we want to know without us having to look it up. Furthermore, all the videos leave us with a satisfying answer. Including answers to questions like: “Why Are You Always Tired?” “Are You Above or Below Average?” “Are Boys Smarter than Girls?”, and going as far as “Is Your Sexual Fantacy Normal?” and “Does Everybody Have a Gay Gene?”
Video by AsapSCIENCE
And then there is this video, posted by Cold Spring Harbor Lab, a research facility located on Long Island, NY. This video, which is the only video of it’s kind amongst all their other YouTube videos on their channel, it borrows the same idea as AsapSCIENCE. That is, it consists of colorful, live white-board drawings, to get (and keep) viewers interested. Except it is not a topic that most of the public thinks about. Instead, it’s about Spinal Muscular Atrophy, something only a select number of people probably even know about. Mostly those who have the disease, or know people who have it. Thanks to it’s colorful, hand drawn delivery, once you play it someone who neither has it or knows someone who has it, they might actually find themselves learning about something they didnt even know existed, dispite it’s heavy vocabulary.
Video by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Osmosis’ videos on the other hand are not exactly meant for the general public. They use the live white-board drawing approach to make it easy to watch, mixed with the learning style like that of Khan Academy. That’s because it’s meant for students learning medical topics. The public might find these videos interesting if they had a specific question, but it’s filled with science goodies that probably won’t be useful to them.
Video by Osmosis
Now, when it comes to full-blown animation, it’s so easy to be stiff and dull (attributes that white-board drawings are meant to avoid). And when it comes to science, there really is no reason to be either of those things. TED-Ed animations are never that way. Each video, with their millions of views, they take live drawings to a new level about scientific questions that are interesting for beyond every-day human curiosity, with titles like “How Does the Heart Pump Blood?”, “Addiction”, “Why Do We Dream?”. Those animations poke at the potential scholar in all of us. TED-Ed animations are like the National Geographic of the internet, they earn some kind of respect, and if they were glossy magazines, they’d be proudly collected in sets that live on the shelf like a trophy. This is what white-board animations are living up to, the animations that seem to express more control and imagination, at the loss of that “human” touch of learning like we all did when we were students in a class room.
Video by TED-Ed
The white-board animation does give you a nostalgic sense, one of maybe that time when you really learned something from a teacher in class. And if that is the hook that draws you in, it’s the live drawing that keeps you there. There is something mesmerizing about seeing a line become a shape that becomes a recognizable illusion of an object. And it’s those illusions that put together the concept from illustrator to viewer.
Studio Biological 