dekay.org

The periodic spiral is a perfect example of infoporn and science visualization. Who would have know that after Mendeleev’s glorious act of inventing the periodic system of the elements, or rather its design and structure — its visualization, someone, some hundred years later would try again. This time, though, it looks functional and pretty: the periodic spiral uses a hexagonal grid in which all elemnts are placed in a spiral starting from the center of that hexagon; the trick that still keeps the chemical grouping together is the generous use of white space: the groups are all aligned radially, blocks are still blocks. So, in a way, there is not much new in this kind of visualization, it is just no longer square but hexagonal. Still, the noble metals are set apart from the less noble ones, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious advantage to do so…

On the mentioned site you can also check out a shockwave application that lets you explore some characteristics and data of the elements; there is also a downloadable (and not free) version for Macs and Windows.