TEDx Toronto

Here's a little something I'm super excited about. Being involved in the amazing TEDx Toronto conference. And a new style altogether for me, dong the final rendering completely in vectors... no hand drawing was involved, besides a rough sketch I used as a guide.  There's a total of 12 of these portraits, one of each of this year's TEDx Toronto speakers.

You may not be able to read it here but I used each speaker's bio as the background texture, which I thought was pretty clever :-).

Emotional Freedom Technique Step by Step Comic

Comics are a great information design medium for sequential visual/verbal information.  If you're mostly used to verbal instructions you might think that all information is sequential, but it's not.  A lot of information is best explained spatially.  Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as EFT or Meridian Tapping, is both.  Actually, it's spacial and kinesthetic and verbal and sequential.  Comics works really well for this whole combination of information types.

Hillside Map 2008 and Beyond

This was designed as a vector image to be easily rearrangeable as the festival layout changes slightly from year to year.  So all the cars and tents and snow fences and other items can be moved around as needed.  I love making maps.  Wayfinding systems are an intriguing puzzle to be solved!

How to Choose Your Hypothesis Test

This decision tree is a learning aid I designed which is in use at the University of Guelph for a class called "Quantification in Psychology".  This is an introductory statistics class.  Choosing the most appropriate hypothesis test for any particular study is key, and somewhat complex since there are a lot of variables that determine what kind of test will do the trick.  I used a colour coding system and boxes shaped to visually augment and represent the verbal content to make this complex flow chart as readable and memorable as possible.

Watch Your Step!

At our Photo business there is a single step between the main office and the photo studio.  Sometimes there is a wine and cheese event.  This is usually when someone fails to remember that this step exists.  We've cleaned up a fair bit of wine off the floors, walls, desks, pen holders, etc.  So we thought having me design this wayfinding signage would help.  So far so good!

As you can see they are designed to alert people from each side of the step.

Front Door Signage Design

My wife and I have a photography business together.  At the front of the studio right beside the door we have a 2x3 foot sign with the pertinent info.  It was time for a redesign to update the info and improve readability.  I've been excited about flow charts and dotted lines lately so I used some of that visual language to tie together the related information.

You see, our studio actually houses 3 semi separate entities...

1) The photo studio.  This information is all connected by the pink dotted lines.

2) Flo (our shooting space is also a dance studio so we make it available for rent and we call that part of the studio "Flo").

3) Me.  My illustration, info design and graphic design services.  My illustration and design studio isn't literally in that space, but I often am and I get to have a bit of free promo out of the deal.  Hooray for free promo!

Game Map, Splinter Cell Cargo Ship Upper Deck

My guilty pleasure is video games.  I love figuring things out.  And I'm extremely patient.  Ubisoft's game "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" is a first person game requiring a lot of patience as you sneak around trying to avoid being detected by the guards.  This level takes place on a cargo ship.  To plan my strategy and keep from getting disoriented in the secret passageways at the beginning of the level I mapped the space.  Drawing this map was as much fun as playing the game!

Cervical Traction Exercises

My chiropractor sorely needed some good illustration to effectively communicate the correct usage of this traction device.  Words alone don't effectively show it, and a live demo is critical but it's easy to forget little details.  The illustration they were using before was very rudimentary and didn't really read very well and I thought it could use a second part to clarify some other information.  So I volunteered my illustrated information design services to make something really clear.  Ever see something that you know you could vastly improve and you just itch to fix it?  Well, that's what I did here.  They loved it.

"How to Edit Your Photos" Cheat Sheet

Photographer Trina Koster asked me to create an easy reference guide, laminated on a handy 8.5x11" card, so that her clients could use it to edit their own photos on Trina's photo management software.  This may look boring to most of you unless you use Aperture to manage your photos, in which case I'm sure you'll find it fascinating!  Oddly enough I found it totally fascinating to create this, because I get obsessive about developing the most effective information design possible.  I think it's the gamer in me.  I'm always trying to find the best, most effective way to accomplish something, or to communicate something.

Info Design Saves Many, Many Thousands of Lives, London, 1866.

One little bit of information design created in 1854 changed conventional thinking in a way that stopped the London cholera outbreak of 1866, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and preventing any more outbreaks since.  Dr. John Snow and a minister named Henry Whitehead did a study and mapped their findings to prove Dr. Snow's hypothesis that Cholera was a waterborne disease.  As a result the government changed their policy and their communications to the public, sparing countless hundreds of thousands of lives by stopping the next outbreak and preventing any further outbreaks.

This little piece of information design is Dr. Snow's map indicating the number of deaths in proximity to a particular drinking water well on Broad Street (indicated with an X).  This "ghost map" was a key element, a linchpin, that finally convinced bureaucrats and doctors alike that cholera was spread via drinking water.  This bit of knowledge taught the Western world about the importance of sanitation in cities, which is what allows major cities to even exist at all today.  I learned about it from this great TED Talk by Steven Johnson.  Click here to check it out.  It's about 10 minutes long.

Art Video... Video Art? Art on Video

Hey! Check out my new video featuring my artwork on YouTube! There's a bit of cool animation in there that I've been itching to put together, all the nifty geometry stuff you'll see in there. Let me know what you think!

Click the image below or go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNikdm6-HsU

UFO Sunset

Doodling in colour with Artrage. ArtRage is great for making sunsets with the pallet knife. But I can't just paint a sunset for it's own sake. Gotta have some kind of narrative going on.