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  Since this "new" version was outdated and still very rough around the edges, I asked for the job of bringing it up to date and into a ready-to-release form.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).

Climatic Branch Overview Briefing

I made this PowerPoint briefing completely from scratch to replace one that was very old and ugly.  Some key attributes of the new version:

• Curb appeal: a polished, professional look that's clean and simple rather than gimmicky and cluttered. 
• Flexibility: the core slides can be used effectively for a five-minute overview, but they are backed by dozens of supplemental slides that contain enough information to use for test program negotiations. 
• Navigability: both the person giving the briefing and those receiving it benefit from the visual cues to the organization of the content.  Extensive linking allows for easily diving into details at any point and for easily returning to the point of departure.
• Maintainability: Updates and edits can be made without triggering a cascading set of consequences.  This was especially important in that an expansion of facilities and some organizational changes were imminent at the time this was produced. 

Travel Report Infographics

In both 2007 and 2008 my wife and I combined work trips and vacation time into multi-week cross-country journeys.  These infographics summarize the trips, and the state outline photos show some of the specific locations visited.

  

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.

George Washington Quotation

I saw this statement for the first time on a framed print in a stairwell in Washington Hall at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania.  I was there for a couple nights on a work trip, and the statement seemed so apropos that I took a picture.  About a year later I was in an office where my coworkers needed to hear something like this, so I printed it, framed it, and hung it on my cubical wall (the original is in storage right now; this is a rendering with a little more texture to the background).

I'm not sure that it triggered any profound changes, but I am sure that everyone got the point.

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.