Don Havey

This blog is officially revived. I have a bunch of work to share. In the meantime, check out my OpenProcessing page or follow me on Twitter.

News: I’m now running a (mostly web) design studio with Stacy Kim called 3c32. Check it out.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/2000-year-old-a.html

In environmental planning, there’s something called a windrose which displays the intensity and frequency of the wind at a particular location, in relation to the cardinal points.

I decided the other day (after once again finding myself explaining what my workload this year has been like) to create a “workrose” that displayed my workload over a specified time period.

I built this thing pretty quickly in Processing. It loads an XML file that contains all of the projects that I’ve worked on this year and dates/events/milestones for each. The data is arranged in radial fashion, beginning with 365 days ago (located at 12:01 on the clock), and progressing clockwise to the current date (at 12:00).

I think it gives a nice overview of how projects are progressing. In addition to windroses, inspiration came from electron diagrams, with each project’s radius determined by its phase. Thus, as a project moves from concept to completion, you’ll see that it jumps from an inner position to an outer one. The specific phases are defined as follows:

1. Concept, proposal
2. Design development
3. Execution, fabrication
4. Revisions
5. Maintenance

When a project is completed or canceled, it gets a green or red dot, respectively.

So you can see that the first part of my year wasn’t bad, then things became periodically crazy, and finally reached a pretty consistent level, which (fingers crossed) show no signs of stopping… there’s a lot of work going on and a lot of work on hold as well (the dotted lines). Most of my canceled projects die in the concept phase… usually meaning that a proposal was rejected.

Right now, most of my work is web-based (or at least digital), but I can imagine this type of diagram working for all types of creative processes. See ya.

** UPDATE: I put the Processing version of this up on my newly redesigned portfolio. **

Kate Beaton makes amazing comics, mostly about historical persons of interest. Just thought you should know.

Barack Obama’s victory speech – New York Times

I’m feeling pretty good today. Anyone else?