hello, i'm editing....Map as a Content Organizer
Ever since Google maps came out, I wanted to hack something together that utilized a map as the means to convey a bunch of data. Any set of data that can be mapped to some geography, would benefit from this. And some things are just easier to understand through their geographic relationships. A photo journal seems like a natural fit as the first experiment. The appropriate credits and related links are included in the experiment.
I kinda dig maps, so more curiosity on this subject will follow!
Development Diagrams
Sometimes you need to explain a workflow(pdf) as it relates to everyday tasks of files and their owners, to get around the lack of content management system in use. Other times, you simply need a guiding map(pdf) so the team can more easily get started.
But the best development diagrams are the ones that describe a business requirement as part of a larger plan. This diagram(pdf) accompanied a use case for one of many web objects proposed in the web development process. Its main goal was to describe how a help wizard would retrieve particular data according to location in the shopping process and who triggered the event; user request vs system error.
Internal Introductions
To re-introduce our team to the larger organization, we asked: what's the best way to talk about yourself or your work, without boring the heck out of the audience in a large corporate meeting, or even worse, sounding really arrogant. The best we came up with was to reveal some fragmented thoughts in the form of interview. Hoping that it might tell the story of what we do in a more casual way. The 9 minute show piece(16.4Mb) worked much better then a boring power point and it even might have been effective. The piece used demo version of some stock reels and therefore was never used beyond prototype. The web site for the company, however, did take on a similar tone.
Digital Document Life Cycle
A co-worker asked me to help illustrate some of the larger workflow concepts in a proposal for one of our clients. I had a very limited involvement with this project. While I didn't dream up the diagram(pdf), I did have to understand the workflow very well to simplify and illustrate it. It's also similar to many other workflow in varying context, so I figured, why not include it here.
Campaign Overview
I had the privilege of being in a small team that pitched some ads to USAToday for their CareersNetwork. This is before they gave up and powered their jobs pages by CareerBuilder. To try to capture all the activities they might possibly be involved in as compared to the competition, we charted a timeline. Too much info makes for poor comprehension, so this chart did not get much use. But going thru the motions of making it did give us a better understanding of what needed to happen and the level of work that was ahead of us.
Some of the ad concepts we pitched for this campaign are currently living among the most unappreciated category:-(
Transition in After Effects
Somewhere around learning After Effects 3 and 4 I tried teaching myself transitions. This panoramic example(1.6Mb) is trying to use still images, color effects, some simple movement, and masking to the beat of a stolen track. If I had an excuse to do it, I could play with After Effects for days.
Brand Mark Comparison
The MBA types seem to love their 2x2s. I thought you could give a comparison chart a bit more dimension by adding a third axis. So the idea is to have 3 scales (hot to cold, white to black, etc.) and map out a bunch of similar things and see their relationship. This chart tries to illustrate the visual aspects of the identity marks for bunch of big brands; on the scale of tone (organic to artificial), style (conservative to bold) and symbolism (abstract to literal). To make this really valuable, there should be a large survey with enough samples to make the data somewhat scientific. The plan was to have a bunch of scales, beyond what's listed here, and dynamically re-arrange the data according to the desired combination of the 3 scales.
Why didn't I think of this in school?!
Oh yeah... there was no flash in the early 90s.
Still, could have been a nice paper.
