Notable Experiments
The lab is a work in progress. Please bear with me.
Presentations
The Fight for Better Presentations
fundamentals of presentation design
With generous input from Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen) and Nancy Duarte (Duarte Design) I set out to push the limits of presentation software to create a memorable short video about presentation design. I distilled my core ideas about presentations into a few key messages and wrapped them in a design language that references some of my greatest inspirations.
The making of is described in this blog post: I used only Keynote to create the animations, exported to iMovie and added a soundtrack. Get the source file here.
Presentation Quest
a concise slide deck tutorial
If you want to craft effective communication you need to understand the conceptual difference between a presentation and a slide deck. I framed the conceptual choice in the metaphor of a nineties rpg video game.
Information Visualization
Not An Infographic
from slide deck to video
The porting of the design was the part I liked best. I love to experiment with cross media applications and see how the same basic information takes different shapes and patterns, and in effect slightly altered meaning each time. Analyzing the functional elements that trigger subtle changes in meaning is a great method to find new angles for media innovation.
Liquid Democracy
an “explainy” web video
I created the video when I started out experimenting with animation to explain complex concepts in simple terms. At the time I was attending a class on democratic theory in political science. Liquid Democracy was a brand new concept in select political circles for which not a single academic paper had been written, so when I took the notes I prepared to present to our class and turned them into a video I happened to create the first publication on the subject. Download it here. The script can be found at this old blog post.
Web Publishing
On The Pitch
(example designed for 500px width)
Picking up earlier experiments with visualizing football tactics and data, the corresponding platform is on hiatus while we create the pubslishing tools for fully responsive interactive football visualizations
Kontextschmiede
the place where it all started
This was my first semi-professional attempt at creating something, anything really, on the web. I dug through tutorials of graphic design, html, php and css for months. We originally had plans to establish an authoring platform with editorial supervision, writing tutelage and more, but facing an overwhelming workload with no financial compensation in sight we soon decided against turning it into a professional venture and it became a bit of a playground for various publishing ideas. In fact, there are several notable experiments still buried in there that I have yet to translate and update. Some of those ideas caught the eyes of people who liked them enough to ask me to work with them. Yeah, I was stoked, too. And that is the story of how I entered freelancing.
The Kontextschmiede is a German authoring platform I created with some friends from school who went into Journalism. We have all since become too busy to continue with it, but some of the work we did there has become the foundation for other projects.
Thank you for reading this far. That is all for now. If you are so inclined, stay tuned. There is more to come.