New work

I hereby designate 2013 The Year of Hard Work. In addition to my day job and trying to stay on top of the house, I’m enrolled in an Information Visualization course and I’m taking on some new freelance and personal projects too. To keep everything cataloged I’ve updated my portfolio:

So head over there if you want to see what I’m up to, design-wise. A lot of it is class work, including this infovis assignment on my own tweeting habits:

For this project I took my two personal twitter accounts and mapped my tweeting frequency and content over time against a variety of life events. There’s a 8.5 x 11″ flyer version of this visualization, too, but I was especially proud of the website, which is hand coded and assembled in under 2 days (shout out to Susan who taught me everything I know about coding [beyond the introduction given to me by my mother] and whose Web Start Women project is an inspiration).

Infovis is a demanding class, so unfortunately I don’t have time for more personal work at the moment. But at some point I’d like to return to making a few more of these lettering pieces:

These are something of a response to the relentless positivity out there in the world of type-based design. You can’t throw a rock on the web today without hitting an artfully lettered but otherwise completely generic “you’re braver than you think you are” or “you only run out of chances when you stop taking them” or “live your dreams.”

Live my dreams, huh? Golly Gee Willikers. Thanks for the tip.

For me, swirly flourishy bits work best when balanced by a little bite. Life bites sometimes. It’s okay to talk about that, too. So that’s what I’ve been doing, and if you’d like to see more you can check out the full set of designs here.

I’ve had a few people express interest in having their own words hand-lettered and I’d love to keep working in this direction, so if you have a favorite saying with a little more personality than “you will never win if you never begin” and you’d like me to take a stab at it, please contact me! I’m going to be a little busy through May, but that’s okay. It’s the Year of Hard Work. Let’s make some awesome stuff.