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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.

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.

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.

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.

I still have a laundry list of items I need to do on the new site (including building my theme for the blog), but if I don’t push it out now, it could be weeks before I get through that entire list. Regardless, I believe it’s ready [enough] for public consumption!

Just to throw it out there, anything inside the /dev directory (including this blog) is completely under development. I’ve been slammed this week with several out of town trips I’ve had to make (Monroe and Milwaukee). Then there’s a trip to Chicago next week for a presentation I will be working hard to put together along with a dozen other things to take care of. I’ve had full intentions of getting this site out the door this week and have even passed the link along to several people.

I just want to make it clear that as long as the /dev/ pages exist, my new site is still in the works. I hate showing something while I’m working on it, but my old site is severely out of date… so here we are. Give me about another week.

2008 has just started. I can only hope this year will be as successful as last year, which just seemed insane where every project I worked on was exciting and many new friends were met and new leaves turned. With virtually no marketing or PR, I managed to get reeled on on some amazing challenges. My only regret is not having left to go out on my own sooner. In the past 12+ years I’ve been in the industry, 1.5 of those were not on my own and that was the only time I felt like I was going backwards, which, I suppose, has taught me to better appreciate my freedom.

With the new year and new challenges already placed before me, I wanted to update my site to make it more indicative of me both from an aesthetic and functional standpoint. This site, however, is not in Flash. I’m reserving that for the Pitch website. All visuals on this site are created with Processing or Flash and all animations are built using JQuery and other javascript goodness.

Another big change is using WordPress now for blog entries. There’s no point to try to reinvent something that is already built so well and works like a charm.

With the new site, my year begins. As noted, there are a lot of exciting things happening both on the professional and personal front. Some of which I will note here when ready. For now, enjoy and expect changes on this site made periodically. I expect it to take several more weeks before I have my site as complete as possible.