Vital Sign Map

One of this week's biggest accomplishments for me was finalizing the coding for this interactive Flash map of our network's vital sign. The content is still being developed, but the structure is there (the hard part, for me at least). I felt kinda nerdy writing ActionScript, but also proud that I was able to teach it to myself. I'm not sure if this blog can show a flash web-feature, but I'll try and figure out some way of posting it.

Just for fun...

As I was packing up last night, my roommate passed this video along to me. This is me, glissading at Artist Point in Mt. Baker.

In August.

David Snyder

Recently, North Cascades hired photojournalist and Artist-in-Residence alumn David Snyder to help build our digital image library. The results are amazing and I'm thrilled to have access to so many high-quality photographs. It's crucial to communicating our parks' goals and mission to the general public.

David also wrote a very thoughtful blog post about his experience:
The park is spectacular. If you have never seen it - and most of you haven’t - go. You will not be disappointed if you have one spark of love in you for wild places. But the park has something else as well - a remarkable collection of people working there - people who love what they do, and whose job, day in and day out, is to protect a national treasure: the park itself. Two and half years now since returning from Africa to the US, the park offers something I haven’t found on the busy and crowded East Coast - a place where the people around you are actually happy to be where they are -where the people love their corner of the world. From what I’ve seen in the last two and half years, we don’t have that here in the East - we run from place to place. We hate our jobs, or at best tolerate them as a menas to an end. And we don’t even take the time, it seems, to recognize that in ourselves.

If ten days in the North Cascade wilderness teaches you much about the world around you, it gives you, most preciously, insight into how you live - detached, in most cases, from the wilderness from which we all emerged. I truly believe we’ve cut that strand to our past to our own detriment - and the chance to reconnect slips away with each road built and each tree cut. Get out to the North Cascades if you can. Get outside at all. It’s where we’re all meant to be.

Changes

Happy Friday everyone! I hope you're all ready for a well-deserved long weekend (I sure am). Today marks a number of transitions for me. My summer sublet is up and I'm moving down to the Seattle area, where I will be taking scientific illustration classes for the school year at the University of Washington. Don't worry, classes don't start until October, so I'll still be working for the Network until then.

My schedule will be somewhat sporatic- I won't be in the office at all next week because I'm headed to Glacier National Park!! Bill Hayden and Steve Restivo are doing some amazing, innovative projects and I'm traveling there, essentially as sponge to soak in their knowledge and ideas. Well, and share some of mine too, I hope.

And then, a week later, I'll be assisting video producer Ron Bend from Colorado State University as he films our monitoring efforts within the Network. Our itinerary has us going from North Cascades to Olympic to San Juan to Lewis and Clark to Mount Rainier...in 6 days.

So lots of great stuff happening this month and I look forward to reporting on it all! Have a wonderful and safe Labor Day.

The Motherload of Inspiration

Oh. My. God. THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TO BE DOING!

An article from the NYT magazine, "The Medium: Tiny Talents" by Virginia Heffernan, introduced me to some of the most exciting forms of education and communication currently available on the web.


How to Avoid Poison Ivy from "Howcast"


How To Survive If You're Lost in the Woods, from "Howcast"


How To Treat a Snakebite from "Howcast"

(note: these videos use a great trick in their timeline at the bottom of each screen. Notice the little red, green, black and blue dots? These correlate to the narration. Red is for warnings, green for tips, black for each instructional step and blue for "did you know" tid-bits. It's a really smart and simple design solution to help reinforce the information.)

What's also really great is the open participation between the community of viewers. You can vote to see if this video was helpful. You can suggest topics. You can upload your own. You can comment on the video (adding validation or criticism). This dialogue, common in places like Wikipedia or Facebook/MySpace, is really what makes the Internet an exciting place for communication and building community. This online fluency is something we the National Park Service, does not have. YET.

Oh, and I checked if there were any instructional videos about or from the NPS...none. This is a ripe, un-tapped market ready for the taking!

Thought: Can we hire this guy to do work for our network?! These are some of the wittiest videos I've seen.

Other videos to watch at your leisure:
How to Use Less Water on Your Yard
How To Make Your Bathroom Eco-Friendly
How To Cook Seven Simple Recipes Over a Campfire

Okay. So excited and inspired. Learning is fun!

Bottom's Up!

Photo by Brady Fontenot, NYT

Education is at the heart of communication and I found this article about the Post-Katrina Classrooms in New Orleans to resonate with my experience working with the NCCN. In particular, this paragraph about Lousiana's state superindendent, Paul Pastorek's theory about education:

"His conclusion, more than a year into his work, is that fixing a public-school system is not at its root a question of curriculum or personnel or even money. It is a question of governance. It is simply impossible, Pastorek has come to believe, for a traditional school system, run from the top down by a central administrator, to educate large numbers of poor children to high levels of achievement. 'The command-and-control structure can produce marginal improvements,' he told me when we met last month at a coffeehouse on Magazine Street. 'But what’s clear to me is that it can only get you so far. If you create a system where initiative and creativity is valued and rewarded, then you’ll get change from the bottom up. If you create a system where people are told what to do and how to do it, then you will get change from the top down. We’ve been doing top-down for many years in Louisiana. And all we have is islands of excellence amidst a sea of mediocrity and failure.'"

Tough, Paul. "A Teachable Moment" The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2008

In this article, I saw parallels between working for a network made of 8 diverse national park units and working for a school system. No, I'm not saying that the NCCN is broken like New Orleans, just that we're still figuring out the best way to manage, organize and maximize everyone's efforts.

You can read the whole article here.

AIDS Awareness Campaigns

In preparation for our up-coming fall workshop on science communication, I'm going to start collecting innovative of non-traditional and innovative communication techniques. Some may be about science, but I'm not limiting myself to that subject...design, pop culture, magazines, technology, advertisements...it can all be inspiration.

From "Advocates Share Ideas in Teaching About AIDS," by Marc Lacey and Lawrence K. Altman

"More than a quarter of a century since the AIDS epidemic was first recognized, the advocates say, they must be increasingly imaginative in their efforts to educate the public about the disease. Posters on display showed condom-shaped superheroes sailing through the air and oversize insects, representing the virus, having sex with unsuspecting victims. The worst thing, those involved in drawing attention to the epidemic say, is to be so dull that people’s eyes glaze over."

What threatens communication?

Here's an interesting and uncommon perspective on communication:

Typography’s principal function (not its only function) is communication, and the greatest threat to communication is not difference but sameness. Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is nothing strange to wonder at and no new information to exchange. For that reason among others, typography and typographers must honor the variety and complexity of human language, thought and identity, instead of homogenizing or hiding it.

-From Robert Bringhurt’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”

I'm currently reading and loving this book. It's a subject that probably interests, oh, maybe .5% of the population; but for whatever reason, I find typography to be fascinating.

This argument of our attention falling victim to sameness reminded me of something I read in the Sunday NYT Book Review last week:

Driving rarely commands 100 percent of our attention, and so we feel comfortable multitasking: talking on the phone, unfolding a map, taking in the Barca-Lounger on the road’s shoulder. Vanderbilt cites a statistic that nearly 80 percent of crashes involve drivers not paying attention for up to three seconds. Thus the places that seem the most dangerous — narrow roads, hairpin turns — are rarely where people mess up. “Most crashes,” Vanderbilt writes, “happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.” For this reason, roads that could be straight are often constructed with curves — simply to keep drivers on the ball.

-From "Slow-Moving Traffic" by Mary Roach, about Tom Vanderbilt's book, "Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)"

Longest post EVER

Happy Friday everyone!

I’ve got lots to share on the blog today so let’s jump right in. I realized earlier in the week that I only have two months left of my season with the North Coast and Cascades Research Learning Network. Where has this summer gone? With all the projects I’ve become involved with, these next eight weeks will require some good time management skills in order to have actual completed projects. I now have 8 post-it notes on my desk with the priorities listed for the remaining weeks.

Post-it number one, as recommended by Sara Melena: NCCN graphic identity, specifically a logo, template for the Resource Briefs, and folder design.

The logo, as mentioned last week, is one of the hardest things to design. It has to be simple and iconic, yet represent an incredibly diverse and complex network. The logo should be specific to our region in terms of colors and content, yet also point back to the larger National Park System.

This was last week’s logo:


After many more brainstorms...


...I’ve eventually settled into this:


Now remember, nothing’s ever final, but this is my top choice and the one I’ll pitch to our Science Communication Committee. Thankfully, this group of 7 or so will make the final decision, not the entire network.


The logo represents the two main natural features of our network: mountains and water (the latter loosely includes coasts, rivers and lakes). The mountains rise up above the horizon as sharp angular shapes. The water ripples outwards in geometric curves. The green is taken from the color palette I developed last week: the dark, wet evergreen that covers every mountainside west of the Cascades. The green of the water is the same but as a 50% transparency.

If one examines the logo closely, eight shapes will be counted; 3 mountains and 5 water components. This is completely intentional as we have three large mountainous parks in our network—Mount Rainier, North Cascades and Olympic—and 5 smaller parks surrounded by or heavily influenced by water—Ebey’s Landing, Fort Vancouver, Klondike Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark and San Juan Island. 8 graphic elements, 8 network parks, all bound together by a surrounding circle.

The text, of course, ties it all together and I prefer the clean, sans-serif lines of our Frutiger 45 Light. I also felt fortunate that the words “The North Coast &” fit evenly above “Cascades Network” without any weird adjustment of spacing.

Chip Jenkins, NOCA’s superintendent, mentioned that the symmetry of the logo reminded him of Charley Harper’s work for the National Park Service.




I’d seen Harper’s posters before but hadn’t looked much further until this week. Have you ever found an artist, or author, or any other individual and immediately felt a connection to his/her work and ideas? I love the clean lines and reduction of complex subjects to “simple” shapes. I find that to be a more difficult, more witty exercise than to copy the subject individual feather by individual feather. As I read Harper’s biography and explored his body of work, I felt a mixture of relief that someone else had similar design aesthetics and anxiety that this person had already filled the creative niche.





Charley Harper died in 2007 and I feel sad that I hadn’t really discovered him before hand. I would have enjoyed seeing an exhibition, if not meeting him in person. Fortunately, he’s left behind an incredible amount of work to provide me with inspiration. There’s this idea of one’s artwork always being part of a larger conversation with contemporary artists and all the artists that have lived before. I’d like to consider some of my work taking his ideas further in this dialogue. For example, he worked by hand and I work digitally. And I know how to animate my work...


Moving on from this art history critique…

Here is a re-design of the Resource Briefs that each monitoring team is supposed to update annually. I didn’t have to do too much, just some cleaning up to make it more readable and consistent with the overall graphic style we’ve developed.





Finally, here are some of the first drafts for a folder that would be used to hold network publications and products.



At first glance, it appears that it’s an abstract landscape, of mountain ranges expanding and fading into the background. Upon closer examination, one realizes the lines are part of graphs and that each peak or valley corresponds to one of the networks (listed on the bottom). If you fold out the back cover, the topics of the charts are revealed. Y-axis’ rise up at varying heights and intervals and text at the bottom explains what each graph measures: number of vital signs, total acreage, distance from Seattle, latitude and longitude, etc.

I’m still trying to figure out the best combination of colors and transparencies so that the resulting image hints at being both a landscape and graph, but without being overtly either.

Oh yeah, the light blue lines in the background should resemble a scientific ledger/notebook as well as rain showers. And this may be reading into the image too much, but does the y-axis lines remind anyone else of totem poles? Unintentional, but an appropriate reference to the cultural history of our region.

I’m also very open to suggestions of other things to graph (# of staff at each park? Annual rainfall?)

Well, I think this should be it for now. There’s a couple more things I could post, but this has turned into a very long entry, so I’ll table them for another time.

Have a wonderful weekend!

NCCN Graphic Identity

Before I was hired, the network and the Natural Resource Program Center in Fort Collins had created an assignment for a class of graphic design students at Colorado State University: develop a graphic identity for the North Coast and Cascades Network. This includes items like a logo, color palette, typographical style guide, brochures, business cards and folder design.

While we were impressed with their efforts, it was also apparent that they were at a disadvantage by being so far removed from our Pacific Northwest landscape. So I've been asked to try my hand at it, to synthesize their ideas and filter it through my perspective as someone who intimately knows the network and our natural resources.

I've started off with the logo and color scheme- two foundational components that influence all other aspects of design. I think I've nailed the colors: a dark evergreen, a light cool granite gray, a dark warmer cloudy gray, and a wet ocean blue. I've also included 4 accent colors- like the bright green of new vegetation in the spring or the bright red of huckleberries.





The logo, on the other hand, has given me the most trouble. How does one accurately represent such diverse national parks? Here are the results of some brainstorm sessions.




This is the best that I've come up with though it's pretty safe and conventional. Because it's the first thing I think of when I think "Coast" and "Cascades", I know I can do better.