Remember when I asked you to join me on my latest adventure? Well in case you haven’t heard yet, I finally got a job! And since it’s primarily an infographic design job (with plenty of CMS and website management packed in), I decided to celebrate by creating an infographic highlighting the things I learned from my NaNoJobMo experiment.I put it on my Tumblr, but I wanted to share it here, too.

I’m hoping my job will encourage me to give the long-neglected Design and Infographics category some new posts. Especially since John and I are starting to process the results to our Anime USA demographics survey. And if anyone is doing an otaku-centric data project (Charles at Study of Anime and Charles at Beneath the Tangles come to mind), maybe we can collaborate!

Click the jump to view the whole infographic. (more…)

If you followed me over from my blog at LaurenRaeOrsini.com, you know that I just split up my online persona this week. As an unemployed journalist looking for work, I thought it was important to separate my portfolio from my hobbies. After all, many of the jobs I am considering don’t involve fandom at all.

For the new LaurenRaeOrsini.com, I endeavored to find the most minimalistic possible WordPress theme out there, and I found that, fittingly, in a theme called Minimalist. From there, I cut even more features and content from the code to snip it down to almost an empty page. The point? I want the web design to almost disappear, and serve as a blank canvas for my portfolio pieces. (Of course, I still retained my signature color palette.)

I never liked how, on my previous site, you would have to scroll through each section of my portfolio in order to see my complete range of skills. On my new portfolio, each skill set has its own subpage.

I think the split is ushering in a new era for both my identity as a professional and as a fandom journalist. Rather than feeling divisive, I think it strengthens my internet persona in both areas. I feel it was the right decision.

After several months of keeping this project under wraps, I am happy to finally show you this year’s Anime USA prospectus. You can download the full document by clicking on that link.

When John and I found out that Anime USA has been in need of a prospectus for years, we decided to make it our top priority as director and vice director of marketing. So we recruited our talented friend Chris Goulait to build the prototype and write the copy, John got hold of the statistics, and I designed the layout in Adobe InDesign CS4.

This prospectus will be used to attract potential advertisers and sponsors to the convention. Anime USA is a 501 (c) (3) educational non-profit, so that kind of support is essential to our growth. Having a specific document to present to companies will help us stand out from other non-profit organizations. I’m so proud of my team for recognizing this and getting it done.

Download the prospectus and let me know what you think!

You may have noticed the new buttons I’ve added over to the right in order to highlight the events I will be attending later this year. I decided they needed a revamp and that the old ones, with their dotted line borders, reminded me too much of cut-out coupons.

I’m a huge fan of Adobe Illustrator for CS4, which I use for almost all my infographic work, so I decided to experiment with vector images. There are a lot of tutorials for making glossy or glassy looking buttons in Illustrator (I blame the Web 2.0 trend), but I thought they were all disproportionately difficult to do compared to the result. So today, let me share with you my simple 7 step glossy button tutorial:

Step one: Make a rounded rectangle using the shape tool. Color it with the accent color of your choice.

Step two: Apply a gradient inside the shape. Use your accent color plus light gray. I used basic colors from the swatch panel.

Step three: Overlay a thinner, rounded rectangle onto your shape. Remove the outline and set the fill color to white.

Step four: Open the Stroke window on the right side toolbar and click the Transparency tab. With the white rectangle selected, lower the opacity to 60 percent.

Step five: With the entire shape selected, go to the Effect tab at the top of the screen and scroll down to Stylize. Select Drop Shadow and create a shadow with 75 percent opacity, a 5 pixel blur, and the x and y offsets at 7 pixels.

Step six: In the font of your choice (I used Futura Condensed Bold size 48), write your text. I filled mine in dark gray.

Step seven: With the text selected, go to the Effect tab and go once again to Stylize. This time, select Inner Glow. Set Opacity to 40 percent (or less but not more), Blur to 3 pixels, and make sure the button is selected on Edge, not Center.

Voila! Enjoy your new buttons. Note how easy it is to customize the colors! Same goes for shape and size.

This is easily the busiest summer of my life. Between two classes, an internship, a job, a non-profit position at Anime USA, plus interviewing for potential jobs, each day is filled to the brim! Luckily, that means I have plenty of new portfolio work to show off on my blog. Here’s a few of my new visualizations that have gone live:

1) Investigative Reporting Workshop

Two projects I’ve been working on for my job here have finally made it up on the site! The first one, on telecommunications, launched in March, but busy me just found out about that recently. The second one, about German firms’ lobbying, got a lot of input from my amazing boss, Professor Lynne Perri. Click on the thumbs to view the full infographics and reporting.

2) Kotaku

Nothing as fancy as my timeline has gone up lately ( but expect a new infographic soon), so let me share my pull-quotes with you. Every week after Kotaku Talk Radio, one of the editors chooses a quote for us to highlight in an image to promote discussion. Here’s the three I’ve designed in the past two weeks. Click on the image to go to the original post.

Just wanted to share how things are going with my pet project at Anime USA. I decided on WordPress’ Arras theme since it’s so easily customizable, and I wanted to get the blog up and running without a lot of tweaking. It’s not a coincidence that this is the same blog theme that Anime Boston used for their blog when I worked that convention — why fix it if it isn’t broken, I think. Click on the photo to take a look around.

It’s only May, but my goal is to get people accustomed to checking the blog for news by updating it throughout the year. I also set up a twitter account to drum up traffic. We’re getting maybe 20 hits a day, but since it’s only May I’m feeling good.

I just posted an entry about my search for bloggers to help me cover the convention this year. I think this could be a great experience for aspiring journalists to get used to the fast paced news cycle of blogging journalism. So journalism students, please apply! Even if you don’t like anime, it’s a great introduction to exploring different cultures in your reporting, something every journalist should learn.

I have a lot of goals for this project, so don’t expect this to be my last post on the topic!

So I talk a lot about infographics. Which ones I think are good, which ones need some work. But can I walk the walk?

Today, I ask you to be the judge of that.

Yesterday, my internship supervisor, Brian Crecente, at Kotaku asked me to make an infographic outlining the history of fighting games with commentary by Capcom. I went for a bright, bold approach using Kotaku’s theme colors and round photos rather than square. I’m not happy with the quality of the photo on the Kotaku site (where we get millions of hits a week, so it probably can’t be helped), so I’m posting it here, too:

Click to expand to full size.

This is my first time building an infographic that isn’t designed for the school or the Investigative Reporting Workshop, so I didn’t have to go for minimalism. I’m somewhat happy with the result, but excited to build more for Kotaku and cultivate my designing voice. So expect more of these in the future.

After months of saving and weeks of shopping around for the right choice, I finally got myself a flipcam! I got to test it out today and I’m feeling pretty good about my purchase.

The Kodak zi8.

I love that this model lets me choose between standard and high definition shooting. So far, I’ve been using mostly standard while just experimenting with HD for a few seconds at a time – I only have an 8 GB SD card in the camera. Which leads me to another thing I like about it- the storage capabilities aren’t limited to what the camera allows. If I feel like I need more storage, I simply need to buy a bigger card. I think that makes the camera less likely to become obsolete quickly.

What I don’t like about the camera is the sound, but I knew that already. There’s only so much a flipcam can do in that department. So what’s really special about the zi8 is that it has a microphone jack that allows me to use an external mic. I’ve tried using a directional mic so far, and it helps to drown out all the noises except the one I am trying to capture.

Testing out my new flipcam at Capitol South.

Another thing that I’d like to add into this post at the last minute is, my new business cards came! I got them through Moo and I adore how tiny they are. “But didn’t you just get business cards made in November?” you might ask. That’s true, but my regular size cards 1) number only in 50, and I have about 15 left at this point and 2) are more professional, while the Moo cards are more personal. I wouldn’t put space invaders on my regular cards!

My new cards, designed by me, published by Moo.

I got 100 of them printed for only $20, which was fantastic, so I got a little case with a keyring to hold them in. I plan on giving these out by the handful at Anime Boston, which I am attending next month as a con blogger. It’s an enormous convention and I hope to make a lot of contacts in the anime world!

It’s only natural that my love of infographics has led to an intense affection for data. About a week ago, I decided I wanted to make some infographics about the rise of fandom documentaries, how diverse they are, and how they’re getting so popular that even Joss Whedon is getting on the fandom-doc train.

The only problem is, no such data exists! Even IMDB can’t help me find a complete list of fandom documentaries (at least, without me having to sort through 20,000 documentaries on every subject. Really.)

So I’m tossing this question out to you, internet users and fellow fans. I’ve made a list of the 30 documentaries I could find so far. If you see something missing, let me know in the comments or by email. I know you’ll find something I’m missing. Thanks in advance!

It’s been a little more than a month (!) since my last infographic roundup, but gorgeous visualizations have not stopped showing up on the Internet, so I think we’re long overdue for another. This time: an infographic in every color of the rainbow!

Purple: Kung Fu Typing by Steven Von Worley

Blue: If You Printed Twitter by Creative Cloud

Green: Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How it’s Spent by Shan Carter and Amanda Cox

Yellow: Haiti Earthquake: Who’s Given What? by David McCandless

Orange: Roomba Visualization by Paul Mathew

Red: What does China Censor Online? by David McCandless

Bonus (Rainbow): Crayola Color Chart by Velociraptor