#24MAG is a collaborative, creative, and transparent endurance publishing event.

Our most recent issue took place on May 10th, 2013, in the East Village, with 25 contributors. Our theme was data. We hope you enjoy exploring it as much as we enjoyed making it! Read it below, or online at issuu.

(Sources and citations will be added shortly.)

#24MAG is read online by 5000+ people, and we think that’s amazing. But if you, like us, think that print is where it’s at, order your copy here:

Every week leading up to production we’ll be releasing a data-themed piece from one of our contributors.

5/01 – our fourth and final piece of art is from returning contributor Aida Manduley, and her words begin now:

I looked at the impressive set of data from this spreadsheet, which lists The PolishAholic’s nail polish inventory as of 4/1/13. With the help of my handy calculator, I counted that she has a total of 2171 polishes. I pulled information about all the colors and finishes for the entire collection and made separate word clouds with each one using Wordle (which gives greater size to words that are mentioned more often).

Findings:

For colors, the top 5 were:

• Blue – 243
• Pink – 200
• Green – 192
• Purple – 189
• Red – 106

It is interesting to note, though, that not all nail polish colors were lumped into the initial “Crayola 8.” It would be interesting to try to re-categorize them all into “basic” colors and see how the final numbers look (and which colors top the list). This variation in naming colors reminded me of the Color Survey on the xkcd’s comic blog (which has some fascinating gendered components too), so check that out if you geek out over such things.

For finishes, the top 5 (or 6!) were:

• Glitter – 565
• Shimmer – 548
• Crème – 336
• Creme – 155
• Holographic – 153
• Duochrome – 63

HOWEVER, not accounted in the above numbers are misspelled or differently-capitalized variations on some of the above results:

• holo = 13
• glitter = 3
• gliter = 3
• gitter = 2
• holographic = 1
• Holographc = 1
• crème = 1

Accounting for those, and lumping crème + creme together, the numbers would change to this (which gives us different numbers, but all in the same order of popularity):

• Glitter – 573
• Shimmer – 548
• Crème/Creme – 492
• Holographic – 168
• Duochrome – 63

4/24 – Our third piece of art is from Editor-In-Chief Sara Eileen Hames:

As to Holmes, I observed that he sat frequently for half an hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it. “Data! data! data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”

More quotes and photos over here: Sara’s website.

4/17 – Our second piece of art is a user-editable Excel spreadsheet made by David Dyte, which you can download and play over here: dropbox.

The spreadsheet comes with three pages: the parameters page, which you can edit; the calculations page, which does the math; and the result page, which draws complex designs based on your parameters.

To illustrate what’s going on here, imagine a spirograph. Most spirographs are a stationary circle with another circle spun around the inside. This spreadsheet computes for a spirograph with two ellipses (hence the two sets of radii on the parameters page), with the smaller spun on the outside. You can change the height and width of each ellipse to change the design, as well as the increment and the distance from the “pen hole” to the center of the cog. These can be set to sizes that would be impossible, physically, and can construct some far more bizarre designs. You can even set the smaller wheel’s radii (the lowercase r1 and r2) to negative values to spin the cog on the inside of the stationary spirograph, though be sure that if r1 is negative, r2 is as well.

Near as we can tell, no one’s ever done this before. David had to do all the math from scratch. Truly he has a dizzying intellect.

4/10 – Check out the sweet video Ian Danskin made to kick us off!