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:

 

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.  

Cemetery Guidebook

A 52-page guide to the burial places of four generations of client's ancestry. Project included researching burial locations, on-site photography, creating a comprehensive organizational system, and of course the layout and formatting of all materials.  I also got it placed in the FamilySearch Digital Library/Catalog for permanent online availability. (Note that you'll need a FamilySearch login to get access to the full version and that I updated this 2010 version in 2014.) 

Significant features:

• Full-bleed maps of the region in which each cemetery is located (with addresses, hours, and contact information for regional resources such as museums and family history centers).
• Full-bleed aerials of each cemetery (with GPS coordinates and burial sites markers).
• Ground-level photographs of each gravesite, accompanied by map and portrait insets.
• Life outlines for each ancestor.

Hardbound Personal History

A 402-page personal history covering client's life from the 1940s to the date of publication. Project included extensive copy editing, the creation and/or improvement of hundreds of images and tables, and all layout and formatting.

Significant features:

• Full-bleed cover and endpapers.
• Cross-country collaboration with client and printer for the full duration of the project.
• Research and special organization of ancestry section.

Technical Report Rewrite

The History and Significance of Military Packaging was written by Joseph Maloney, Jr in the late 1980s.  It was later published as Technical Report 1-96 by the Defense Systems Management College Press.

I was first introduced to a version of the report that was being updated by Mr. Maloney when he retired.  Since this "new" version was outdated and still very rough around the edges, I asked for the job of bringing it up to date and into a ready-to-release form.  I got the job, and this is the result.

To get a sense of the quantity and quality of the work I did, you can go here to look at the first published version of the report (39 pages long), or go here to see the version that I started with (51 pages long).

Book of Dates (1752-2111)

This booklet of dates started as a Java programming practice exercise.  I expanded on a small example program that would create a one-month calendar when a month and year were specified by the user.  Instead of one month, I had my program output a full 359 years calendars.

The raw data wasn't very usable, so I formatted it such that four years dates at a time would fit on a printed page.  In the outside margin of each page I specified the dates covered.  The position of this indicator is an indicator of itself - at the beginning of the booklet it is near the top of the page, but by the last page it has moved nearly to the bottom.

To complete the package I wrote up the results of some calendar research I had done, added a colophon and the Java code, and turned the whole thing into a PDF.

Interface Mockup for Custom Testing Software

As I put it in one version of my resume: "Created and documented a mockup of a database-backed system for test tracking and recording."  Some of the resulting visuals are in the composite image to the right..

This was a self-initiated project sparked by seeing how inefficient and mistake-prone testing could be, even with clear regulation-based guidelines.  Some common problems came from turnover in the testing workforce, the sheer volume of test items, the volume and variety of test data, and the frequency of delays during the tests.

My proposed database-backed system would take advantage of the formalized guidelines to make the testing process run on rails, and would thus solve the just-listed problems.

UPDATE 1: Speaking of rails, as I researched the best way to implement the system, I got a taste of the future when my research took me to the Ruby on Rails project; I could see that web-based approach was certainly the best solution.

UPDATE 2: Looking back from early 2013, I can also now see that tablet-like devices would have been (and still would be) the ideal hardware to match with the software described/shown.  On-the-floor testing makes even notebook-type solutions awkward, but a direct touch-based interface running on a small tablet would be just right.