Saturday, July 27, 2024

Family History Visuals

 Before-and-after images of work for a personal history project now in process.  First up, a composite of two maps from 1911 and one from 1932 (each of the source images is in a different orientation and at a different scale).  The main item of interest is a home that is on the edge of one of the maps on the left.  This home is near the center of the finished image.  The school is also of interest, and I brought in the 1932 outline of the school because the new parts of the building were added just a few years after the 1911 map was made:


Next: the home is still standing, but the view from the street is obscured by trees, so I made a simple sketch with no trees showing:


 

Thursday, January 18, 2024

AI-assisted Poster Art

A poster for the 2024 eclipse. The background image is modified from something I made with Google’s AI-powered image generation tool.  A note on the AI aspect of this: for the last few months I've used a set of similar prompts as a sort of homemade benchmark for the tools from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.  This is one of the resulting images that I especially liked.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Family History Graphic

I put this together for my extended family.  We grew up hearing about how Grandpa Don built airplanes during the war, and this shows exactly where it happened and some of what it looked like.  It started when I tried looking up "Weeks Ave." after I came across the photo of the house; it turns out that the street no longer exists.  So instead I found a map of San Diego from just before the war (the map is from 1940), and the rest came together from there.  


Postscript: Consolidated merged with Vultee in 1943 and became Convair, which was bough by General Dynamics in the 1950s, which was bought in turn by McDonnell Douglas in the early 1990s.  McDonnell Douglas closed all manufacturing operations in San Diego by the mid-1990s, and Lindbergh Field is now the San Diego International Airport.  All the old buildings are long gone, but you can still see artifacts from the 1940s on display at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park, including a fully restored PBY.

Saturday, June 3, 2023

Branding for Wasatch Elementary School 75th Anniversary

I worked with others on the basic design, then refined it and provided multiple variations in vector and raster formats to allow for use in digital form, on posters, banners, clothing, stationary, etc.  Every time we stop by the school it's cool to see it in new and different forms and in new and different places.



Monday, July 11, 2022

Process Flowcharts for Food Ordering Systems

I created complete workflows for users and admins for two food ordering systems: a text-based system and a no-code system. The flowcharts shown here are for the text-based system.  All were created to compare capabilities/limitations and to development cost estimates/run rates between these two and a custom web app option. (Off-the-shelf systems were also considered but didn't have the right features.)

Adding User Process Flowchart.Ordering Process Flowchart

The no-code option won out even though it had fewer capabilities, mainly because its short-term and long-term costs were significantly lower.  After we decided on the no-code option, I implemented it by:

  • Making the Google survey and connected tracking spreadsheet
  • Managing the transition off the old system  
  • Training those that have kept the new system running ever since 

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Cover design and Photography

I made the cover for the self-published book Encounters with Rabbits.  I also provided the main images on the front and back cover.


Friday, November 22, 2019

Office of Economic Development Booklet

An eight-page opportunity zone booklet I put together for the Governor’s Office of Economic Development after researching and writing the content.  As with the Campus Overview (and many of my other projects), I used existing material and created graphics and took photos as needed to get the best finished result.