Translating an engineer’s creative ideas…

Autopilot poster

Aggregated data from 8 different documents, which are shown in the background.

Every once in a while there’s a trickle-down project that lands on one’s desk. In this particular case, our director’s husband called in a favor for a big presentation he was working on for a conference. It bounced around the Seattle office, then to our NY office. That’s when this hot potato landed in my lap.

This ended up being a pretty fun distraction from all the Windows 8 work at the time. It was quite a challenge to incorporate ALL the information requested from the handful of PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, and Word docs. But after a few back-and-forth emails and a call or two, I was able to distill all the high level datapoints and somehow squeeze it all in.

First thing I did was comb his docs and put it all in one place. With all the data to show, it was an easy call to ignore any photos or illustrations, the data visualizations would be telling the story. The rest was production work: re-drawing the charts in Illustrator. The final step was pretty tricky—I struggled with snapping the charts to a grid as the charts had different metadata hanging outside of the chart itself. The thing I like the least about this was the gap between the Server count over time and DC Cost per Megawatt charts.

But Randy seemed pretty happy with the poster. I think it served its purpose well at the conference. Back to Windows 8 comps 😐.