PRODUCTION DESIGNER, MAR 2009 - AUG 2011

Working weekends and being the only designer on shift helped me learn to think fast and take action.

Although the Deepwater Horizon explosion happened on a Tuesday, it wasn't until Friday it became clear the leak was a huge problem with no fast resolution. I created this graphic in Illustrator and manually updated every few hours as we learned of progress to fix the leak until more staff came on board to prepare an automated solution.

I love graphics about pop culture. They facilitate self-reflection without feeling like work. I spent hours researching various metrics for my concept pitch "What makes a top song?" and convinced a developer to spend days building the thing.

Then it launched and got virtually no clicks. (I'm still sorry, Ken.)

It's a beautiful interactive, but I learned a lesson on data design: Tell users what's important, then let them dig into it for more. That helped me a lot on my master's project a few years later, which had a much more successful media run.