Concepts for article about police lying under oath
Early last year I jumped out of my full-time job and into art directing, designing and illustrating on my own. It was exciting, occasionally grueling and sometimes terrifying. Over the past year I also made an intentional effort to shift the focus of my work. Encouraged by Ben Pieratt, I (mostly) stopped working on print projects and starting creating solely for the web. Ben states,
The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. The Western world is porting itself over to the web in mind and deed and is looking to make itself comfortable and productive. It’s every person in the world, connected to every other person in the world, and no one fully understands how to make best use of this new reality because no one has seen anything like it before. The internet wants to hire you to build stuff for it because its’ trying to figure out what it can do. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone.
This change in focus has led to some really exciting places. I was able to connect with some fantastic people and work on some really great projects (even win a few awards, and more importantly, make enough money to get by).
Most of these projects involve data visualization, adding context and meaning to the exponentially growing world of data around us. This has been a fairly seamless evolution of my focus, using design thinking to tackle visual solutions to problems. (This goes much deeper than aesthetics.)
Today is special for me, because I’m teaming up, full-time, as a Creative Director at Visually. Visually is a data visualization agency and community which is helping redefine the ways we get information and insight from our data. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working at the intersection of creativity and technology, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next.
Insanely awesome animation
Yukon Cornelius was always one of my favorite characters - made this while watching Rudolf with my daughter today.
As the election cycle heats up before the Conventions, the Google Politics & Elections team approached JESS3 to create an infographic that clearly depicts the modern voter. This infographic I created for them helps illustrate that in today’s world, campaigns can no longer rely on one screen (TV) to reach voters. The majority of voters seek political information on their computers, smartphones and tablets.
Little Man Goes to Dinner
If you didn’t read my previous post, scroll down so you can get a little background on the San Francisco Chronicles “Little Man” that they’ve used for movie reviews since the 40s.
I took the little man and translated him to restaurant reviews, but I wanted to add multiple rating points. Many restaurant reviews will rate Cost, Service and the Food itself. So my goal was to integrate those points into my revised little man.
I came up with the following for each:
I thought a good metaphor for cost was a table cloth. The more expensive the restaurant, the longer the table cloth. As we all know, better service keeps your drink topped off (maybe even annoyingly so), and the little man reacts to the food. For poor food he leaves and for exceptional food he stands on his seat and shovels it down. I thought these all worked pretty nicely once you know what elements to look for. Here’s it all together from least - most ratings for all elements.
Found out about this “little man” from austinkleon, I’ve always been frustrated with star ratings myself, and this seems to make a lot more sense. Would be interesting to combine this idea with the concepts of Bret Victor’s proposed Amazon rating redesign.
The Little Man: The San Francisco Chronicle’s Rating System
The only rating system that makes any sense is the Little Man of the San Franciscio Chronicle, who is seen (1) jumping out of his seat and applauding wildly; (2) sitting up happily and applauding; (3) sitting attentively; (4) asleep in his seat; or (5) gone from his seat….The blessing of the Little Man system is that it offers a true middle position, like three on a five-star scale.—Roger EbertThe Little Man was the creation of Chronicle artist Warren Goodrich in the early 40s.On the occasion of the Little Man’s 50th birthday, Goodrich recalled it was just another assignment that he dashed off quickly, noting, “I’m surprised (it) continued.”…Goodrich, who died last year, once recalled that a woman (possibly a disgruntled actress) once hit him on the head with her umbrella and said, “I hate the Little Man!”There’s more:I actually think the mouth teak on #3 is confusing — if #3 is truly in the middle, his back should be against the chair, and his mouth should be a straight line (or no line at all), with no eyebrows. A blank face. (I couldn’t track down the original…does anyone have it?) Like this:The Little Man pose in between the politely applauding and the snoozing Little Man was redesigned in a microscopic makeover: the “alert viewer” Little Man’s expressionless mouth was tweaked with a slight upturned curve, to indicate a hint of a Mona Lisa smile, suggesting a vague amusement. His raised eyebrows indicate interest but not quite approval, denoting mixed feelings. After artistic spinal fusion, he also sat up more alertly, signifying a mixed review.
All of this came after Talmudic editorial discussions about the meaning of the enigmatic No. 3 Little Man: Did his indecipherable gaze indicate intrigue or ennui? Polite diffidence or glazed-eyed apathy? As a Datebook editor noted, “He’s the middle child, and the most unmanageable.”
both will burn together, with no one to quench the fire.”
