Exposed!

The Guardian newspaper pulls back the veil on my "secret" employer...

(Click to enlarge)

Visit the paper's behind-the-scenes article here.

Here's one I made earlier...

Wow, it's been a while since I did a blog entry. Four months maybe? Since joining Graphic News and moving to a temporary home, I've been too busy to do one. The only reason this is going up now is because I've been off work sick today!

My old Globe And Mail work colleague Dean Tweed, asked if I'd been moonlighting for my former employer when he saw this graphic in the paper today.

(click to enlarge – also, Globe online version can be found here)

Er, no, I haven't. This is a graphic I did back in July 2009 when the car and bodies were found. I remember it being a super-tight deadline and only just getting it out in the scant few hours I had. But it's nice to see it get a second life and good to see it was on the money and required very little "verdict tweaking".

Back by popular demand...

(Click for clearer view)

Further to an earlier post: the Cardiff Design Festival infographics exhibition (featuring that blue North American graphic thingy of mine, above) has now ended. However, it was such a success that festival directors requested it be moved from the Sho Gallery to their headquarters at the Cardiff Story Museum in the city centre to give it more legs. The exhibition will restart there on Thursday and run until November 9.

Who knew infographics could be so popular?!

One in nine million...

I was web surfing away the other night when I stumbled upon a banner advert for istockpohoto.com. Imagine my surprise when I saw one of my own clip art items that sells on their website appear in the ad!

(Click for clearer view)

This is either phenomenally lucky (since they claim to have 9,000,000 images up there), in which case I'm off to buy a lottery ticket and scratch card right now, or somehow they're using my browser's cookies to display images it knows I designed. Whichever is true, it's a little freaky and weird.

BTW, my istock portfolio can be found here, if anyone wishes to increase my pocket money!

The most unnecessary of infographics...

I've seen my fair share of bad taste infographics in my time – usually perpetrated by newspapers – so I have to take my hat off today to Gulf News in Dubai for really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this humdinger.

There's so much wrong with this that it beggars belief. And the artists even put their names to it at the bottom! Thanks to Yanthe Harper for spotting it.

Infographic clichés...

People who know me would attest that I'm not a fan of the 'wall-o-pies' style infographics that are plaguing the web at the moment (in fact I wouldn't even deem them to be infographics at all). You know the sort of thing I mean – huge, tall vertical graphics that scroll downwards forever, full of stick people drawings and endless meaningless drivel statistics that just confuse, bore and turn off the reader. So it was a joy today to come across an infographic that ridicules the trend.

Congratulations to Alberto Antoniazzi for his sense of humour and to Bridget O'Donnell for tweeting the fastcodesign.com article.

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October 4 update:
Just spotted this rant by Gizmodo about about crappy infographics. The tide is turning... hopefully. Click here to read it.

Good f*cking design advice...

I fell over this website this afternoon (stole it actually from Edinburgh illustration lecturer Glen MacBeth's Facebook page) and just had to share. It's called Good Fucking Design Advice and is, well, brilliant actually. Check out this astute poster which you can buy from their online store.

(Click for clearer view)