Visual Communication Designer & Educator
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Contents
Creative Research, 2015 — Present
I make information more accessible by combining visuals, writing, and data into vivid stories. Like onramps to buildings for those who can’t climb the stairs, I seek to create onramps to knowledge for more people.
A comprehensive, inclusive approach to visual communication design is vital for sustainability. We may become enamored by how many facts we’ve gathered about the world and the powerful technologies to display them. Yet we often see and understand with limited views. We are losing our understanding of what we study and how we approach our knowledge. We need to know details, deeds, and insights that only appear through sustained attention.
Study, craft, and joy: a design education for the whole person.
Interactive
Art Direction, Data Viz, UX & Web Design, Writing & Cartooning…
My creative research includes visual communication, literacy, sustainability, and the digital humanities. I'm also a co-founding team member of Graphicacy, a data design firm in Washington, DC. I served as an Art Director at Graphicacy from 2012—2023.
I plan to continue to contribute to selected Graphicacy projects as a consultant.
Center for American Progress
Reimagine CAP’s Websites
GraphicacyCAP
UX & Web DesignWritingUser research
America After 3 PM
America After 3PM
GraphicacyAfterschool Alliance
UX & Web DesignData VizDashboard Design
Tell the Meridian Hill Pictures
Storysharing, Filmmaking & Community Building
Meridian Hill Pictures
UX & Web Design
State of Our Cities
Visualize School Assessments
GraphicacyGeorge W. Bush Institute
Data VizDashboard DesignUX & Web Design
Orb Media: Generation Activist
Generation Activist
GraphicacyOrb Media
Data VizCartoonSocial Media Design
Orb Media: Fighting Blind
Are We Fighting Blind?
GraphicacyOrb Media
Data VizCartoonSocial Media Design
US Defense Health Agency Atlas
/w=3840,quality=80)
Vets Talk About their Care
GraphicacyIpsos🇺🇸 U.S. DHA
UX & Web DesignData VizDashboard Design
The Top 50 Books from Essence Magazine’s Bestsellers List for Fiction
Bestsellers in Black Fiction
Jacinta Saffold
Data VizDashboard Design
Google Reputation Tracker
Google Googles Itself
GraphicacyIpsosGoogle
Data VizDashboard DesignUX & Web Design
Communication Design Faculty Census 2018
Surveying Design Faculty
Design Incubation
Data VizDashboard Design
Victorian & Modernist Poem Viz
Victorian & Modernist Poem Viz
🇨🇦 University of Victoria Digital Humanities Summer Institute
Data Viz
Art Direction, Data Viz, Infographics, Book Design, Writing & Cartooning…
Right Place, Right Time
Right Place, Right Time: A Photojournalist’s Search for Storytelling Photographs
Ted Spiegel
Graphic Design
State Boundaries
Stovepipes & Bootheels: How Did States Get Their Shapes?
Graphicacy📍NACIS
Graphic DesignMap Design
Citizens Budget of Iraq
Iraq’s Budget Made Easy for its Citizens
Graphicacy🌐 World Bank🇮🇶 Iraq
Graphic DesignData VizCartoon
Map for Gamboa's World, by Christopher Albi
A Diplomat’s World in Colonial Mexico
Christopher Albi at SUNY New Paltz
Graphic DesignMap Design
Deep Time Poster with Charles Floyd
How Might We Go Deep into Time?
Couple 3 FilmsCharles Floyd: Artist
Graphic Design
Data Ethics
Dashboard Design for an International Client & Government
A Post-Oil Economy Vision
GraphicacyIpsos
Data VizDashboard DesignData Ethics
Right Research Book Chapter: Chapter 8. Inspiration from Goethe's Tender Empiricism
What Digital Humanists Can Learn from Goethe’s Tender Empiricism
🇨🇦 University of Alberta
Data Ethics
Continuing Growth
Viz for Social Good with David Whitmore
Viz for Social Good: Leading Education & Communication
Viz for Social GoodDavid Whitmore: Designer
Continuing Growth
Water Words
Water Words
SelfPoetry CaravanMadeline Veitch: Librarian
Book DesignContinuing GrowthGraphic DesignData Viz
Children’s Book Designs
Dragon & Me and Molli & Me Children’s Book Designs
Margi & Mark Kramer
Book DesignDigital ColoringContinuing Growth
Basho & Friends
Basho & Friends: How Words Saved the Trees
SelfJulie Finton: Co-DesignerAnurati Srivastva: Co-DesignerSweta Pendyala: Co-Designer
Graphic DesignContinuing Growth
Water Beacon
What If We Could Check the Water Like the Weather?
SelfMoses McCall: Developer
Graphic DesignContinuing Growth
2016 Dorsky Faculty Art Show: Intimately Unfamiliar
Intimately Unfamiliar: iPhone Fingerpainting Portraits
Art
Writing
ACADEMIC WRITING
Haiku Cake and Garden: How an Engineer and a Graphic Designer Cultivated Community in Isolation
Haiku Cake and Garden: How an Engineer and a Graphic Designer Cultivated Community in Isolation
Recently, my wife asked me what birthday cake I wanted. “Haiku cake,” I said. My wife imagined, sketched, designed, and baked a vegan carrot cake of Basho’s classic haiku, “old pond / frog jumps in— / splash.” She made the cake with fresh carrots pulled from our garden.
November 14, 2021
Peer-reviewed
Message Journal, University of Plymouth
Basho & Friends:
Haiku as Play Verse for an Accessible Digital Humanities Experience
Basho & Friends
In this essay, I’m presenting a digital humanities project that’s attentive to the unmet literacy needs of my former students, which began early in their education. This project is collaborative and experimental. We imagine students engaging with this project in a writing classroom, facilitated by an educator.
November 1, 2021
Peer-reviewed
IDEAH, University of Victoria
Right Research Book Chapter: Chapter 8. Inspiration from Goethe's Tender Empiricism
Right Research: Modeling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene
Tender empiricism, as described by Goethe, offers a complementary way of observing today. It removes the subject/object separation from the process of collecting these observations. Instead of separation, to remain objective, the person doing the observing is aware of their relationship with the object in time and place...
June 1, 2021
Peer-reviewed
University of Alberta
Design & Culture Reviews Editor
Reviews Editor
This shows evidence of my acceptance as a Reviews Editor at Design & Culture, a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis. My term is for three years.
February 1, 2021
Peer-reviewed
Design and Culture Journal
Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook
Right Place, Right Time
Case Studies: See “behind the curtain” to learn what digital research looks like in practice.
December 14, 2020
Peer-reviewed
Beth Fischer (Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Williams College Museum of Art) and Hannah Jacobs (Digital Humanities Specialist, Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, Duke University)
Basho & Friends Artist Statement
Basho & Friends Artist Statement
Basho & Friends is an in-progress prototype for an interactive children’s book. Here, children ages 8-13 collaborate with young Basho, the legendary founder of haiku poetry, to become poets themselves. This project exemplifies a “convivial tool,” defined by philosopher Ivan Illich as a platform designed to promote creative expression. Here, we imagine new possibilities for reading, sensemaking, and creative writing based on past forms and ideas. Through poetry, Basho promotes meaningful principles of literacy and sustainability today.
September 1, 2018
Peer-reviewed
Journal of Creative Writing Studies
Unflattening Book Review
Unflattening Book Review
A book review of Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis, for Design and Culture journal.
June 1, 2017
Peer-reviewed
Design and Culture Journal
Art School Critique
Design Thinking as a Framework for Pedagogy
Art School Critique presents thoughts about teaching in the creative field. I wrote an essay in a book about design thinking, and how its methods can be used to design effective learning experiences.
January 1, 2017
Peer-reviewed
Columbia University Teachers College
PUBLIC WRITING
Readers, Not Users: How Dashboards Promote Data Literacy during COVID-19
October 1, 2021
Readers, Not Users: How Dashboards Promote Data Literacy during COVID-19
This essay includes a July 2020 interview with Graphicacy Creative Director Jeffrey Osborn and Lead Data Visualization Designer and Associate Creative Director, Carni Klirs. It’s about their COVID-19 dashboard collaboration with a team at Johns Hopkins University. All quotations in this essay were transcribed from that interview in July 2020.
Comics Make Learning Easier for Children on the Autism Spectrum—and Everyone
March 27, 2021
Comics Make Learning Easier for Children on the Autism Spectrum—and Everyone
We want to change the way people talk about Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). We invite educators, practitioners, curriculum designers, learners, students, and anyone interested in the field of SEL to share their learning with the community. — UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development
Yoshi’s Invitation
May 4, 2020
Yoshi’s Invitation
Around the world, volunteer thinkers and makers make Viz for Social Good possible. These “thinkerers” bring their knowledge, skills, optimistic attitudes, and values to data viz projects for the social good. Mission-driven organizations benefit from this collaboration by seeing their data transformed into vivid and shareable stories. Volunteers work on these projects through local chapters that host Hackathon events. They may also volunteer online and submit their work for review by the VFSG team and the partner organization.
DataX Conference Panel Discussion
November 7, 2019
DataX Conference Panel Discussion with Viz for Social Good
To my fellow panelists; like myself, you are here because you believe in the power of data for good. Tell us about your journey with Viz for Social Good...
Viz for Social Good Interview: Neil Richards, Japan Food Bank Winner
October 4, 2019
Viz for Social Good Interview: Neil Richards, Japan Food Bank Winner
Japan Food Bank wanted to raise awareness of rising poverty rates in Japan...
How to Viz for Social Good: Part 1 of 2
July 31, 2019
How to Viz for Social Good: Part 1 of 2
Viz for Social Good is hosting hackathons around the world for a volunteer partnership with Kiron, a non-profit based in Germany that supports refugees and their educational goals...
How to Viz for Social Good: Part 2 of 2
July 31, 2019
How to Viz for Social Good. Part 2 of 2
In part one of this blog post, I talked about how visualization can work in hackathon settings. That begins with creating a space for creative thinking. And thinking begins with the individual. Yet telling stories with data is inherently social. For good causes, we often see the best results when diverse peoples convene to communicate, converse, collaborate, and co-create.
Below, you can read more about how visualization works like a language, supporting similar purposes as verbal language.
Mindful tools for data exploration (or, how to make visual lasagna)
January 5, 2018
Mindful tools for data exploration (or, how to make visual lasagna)
World-changing ideas traveled fluently along the twenty-one inches between William Playfair’s mind and fingertips. Playfair, the eighteenth-century Scottish engineer who invented the bar, pie, and line chart, relied upon an oft-overlooked digital tool: his hand. He plotted each chart with pen and paper...
Blog posts
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