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I was super stoked to have Pitch’s work in Esquire’s October issue on the shelves this month. Here are some shots:

Not our work here, but this is the cover. This is the first magazine to use e-paper, which is pretty historic. I hear it’ll make it to the Smithsonian… which would rock.

Our write up in the contributor section. Rather than a head shot, they asked for a sample of our work. This piece is actually a civil war visualization. It maps out the battles with the size of the circles being the size of the army. More on that soon.

The full-page Illustration.

The half page piece.

Thanks a ton to tipo and nick for helping out with this. Their support made it possible for us to generate 15 different directions Esquire selected from.

Nick and I have been working on this one for a few weeks now, as time has permitted. It involved visualizing over 1.4 million rows of data provided by the Federal Electoral Commission to examine patterns in the types of donations given to both presidential candidates running this election. Read more about it >

I’m on a quest, searching for data about the elections (if you know of any resources I should look at, send them over). One of my searches brought me to the FoxNews website. It shocks me that people actually use this as their reliable source of news. Before I go off on a tangent about my perspectives on Republicans and what they’ve done to this country (and the world), I will focus on a diagram I found on the FoxNew > World > Europe page.  This diagram tops my list of terrible diagrams that I’ve seen this year. The geographical representation of each country is an embarrassment and I’d love to hear from the person who came up with this what in the hell he was thinking. Anyway.. pretty funny…. and sad.

Esquire’s October issue will be the first ever with an electronic cover that will animate while on the shelves. There’s a New York Times article about it that’s pretty interesting. This caught my attention because Pitch, my company, is going to have some diagrams we designed in this 75th anniversary issue along with a contributor’s section. This is getting very exciting, especially because I’ve been wanting to move more into data visualization work for several years now. It looks like this year is the year of that transition.

I’m almost tempted to put this project in my portfolio since I started the development of it. The Back To School microsite for Kohls was my first chance to really work with Papervision in Flash. Even though a few features from my original code remain, the overwhelming bulk of the development of this goes to my friend Charles, who picked up the project as I left for Croatia earlier this Summer. With a wedding to organize, having a crappy internet connection (G3 is nice for the iPhone, but sucks when you are working with a project of this size) and the fact that I was overseas for nearly 2 months meant that I, unfortunately, could not give this project my all. Luckily, it was in good hands with Charles who took it to the finish line. Nice work.

Next weekend is FlashBelt in Minneapolis, MN. This is probably my favorite conference because of the size (small enough so you can speak with speakers), the organization and because Minneapolis is a great city. I can’t make it out there this year because I’m currently in Croatia and am having a wedding on that very weekend, but I would definitely point anyone to this conference who is interested in improving their Flash skills, searching for inspiration (there’s more than plenty this year), or curious about what’s new out there in the world.

It’s definitely an event worth going to. Check it out.

Last Summer Nick (my assistant) and I were working on a piece for a dataviz contest that we ultimately decided not to enter. Not because we didn’t like the work we did (viewed here). We were actually very pleased with the results. It came down to the final wire where I was leaving on a much needed, month long vacation in Germany. The day before I left, I saw that we were required to write a two page abstract for our work. So it came down to sacrificing a few days of my trip to write something stellar, slopping something together in the plane, or forgetting what the Internet is as soon as possible for my trip. I chose the third option. There will be other contests and this work was really more for kicks than anything. Besides, what if my plane had crashed? Or I died on the Autobahn my first day? Wouldn’t that suck much more? Seriously though, when life calls you, you have to live it. Push yourself as far as you can, but take a break and enjoy the scenery.

Did you enjoy that? Well, enough of my rambling. The other day, our Oscar Movie piece was showcased over at  visualcomplexity.com and the feedback I’ve received has been more than inspiring. It looks like we may have some work coming too. Like we’re not busy enough as it is! This is very cool though and I hope the beginning steps to a place I’ve been wanting to go to for many years with my professional career.

Finding reliable large datasets is not always as easy as it seems. The reason is that there is so much potential data and when you are looking for something specific or trying to find a relationship between two or more things, you often have to work with separate and often inconsistent datasets. I could not even find reliable information recently on data depicting battle and casualty data from our Civil War. Though I’m sure there is data available online, I had a difficult time finding any from a reliable source and ended up going to the public library to find and manually enter the data I was searching for.

Though the United Nations doubtfully collects data from the American Civil War, they do have information on more recent civil wars around the globe along with tons of other significant and useful information. The UN recently created a Website called UNdata where they make available a wide range of datasets, from global poverty to WHO statistics. Some good information I’m sure to use in the coming weeks on a personal project.

This is a great book I came across a few weeks back that I would recommend to anyone remotely interested in data visualization. Partly because it’s a great resource and partly because it doesn’t cost you anything.

Grab it here

It’s focus is on advocacy organizations and basic principals and techniques of information design.

I was glad to have some relative peace during the first few weeks of this year. I have to admit, when the word ‘recession’ starting showing up all over the press, I had some flashbacks from the dot-bomb era just over 5 years ago. I felt fortunate to have had such a busy year last year. But the recession hasn’t seemed to hit this industry much (knock on wood). I’m now booked through April with some very exciting work with some more great clients. The only bummer is that this just means I will have less time to finish up my own site and my company’s site.