Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Changing careers

Now that I've got your attention, let me say that the headline is an excuse to share some photographs of yours truly wearing one of the t-shirts that I've printed on demand. The joke originated on Monday, when a well known journalism professor* suggested that I should sell these, instead of spending my life making, grading, or critiquing information graphics.

Needless to say, the picture on the t-shirt below is John Snow's cholera map. The photo was taken by Mariandrea GarcĂ­a during the Chicas Poderosas tech workshop, at our own School of Communication.




I've printed other t-shirts with Joseph Priestley's Chart of History, Darwin's sketch of the tree of life, and one of William Playfair's line charts. I proudly wear them to classes. It might help students remember that they shouldn't dare to mutter "you know nothing" when I discuss Snow's masterpiece. Some of them do.

Here's another photo, shot during the talk. I was explaining something that every designer older than 35 knows: Adobe Illustrator is and was superior to Macromedia Freehand (ahem.)





Name-dropping alert