I was looking around on swissmiss and found the link to these amazing “living patterns” showing the framework of city streets (via DesignNotes). I feel like the patterns stand alone as works of art, but in fact carry valuable information. After a little digging, I believe the “figure ground maps” are by Allan Jacobs for his book Great Streets.

I also loved her post with this interesting map by Information Architects Japan that uses the existing framework of the greater Tokyo train map to chart web trends for 2008.