Author: Erica

In the last post, I wrote about a color picker application that I’ve been playing with as an evening project lately. I’m going to be building some fairly demanding color palettes over the next few months at work, and wanted a tool that would support iteration and cut some of the time out of the…

Having the ability to make your own tools is one of the best things about programming. Recently, I’ve been working on color palettes for a data visualization application at work, and needed a better (and less manual) way than mocking up a bunch of alternatives in Illustrator. I wanted a few very specific things from…

My course in d3 and data visualization for the Northeastern graduate program was recently highlighted on their blog. I was extremely proud of the students’ final projects; they did a great job of going from zero to some pretty amazing webpages in just a few short weeks. Course syllabus with links to weekly student work…

Back in May, I submitted a proposal to the VERTIGO STARTS initiative for an artist residency with the GROW project in Scotland. The GROW project disburses soil moisture sensors to citizen scientists in Europe, who then place the sensors in the ground where they live. The sensors automatically report information on soil moisture, nutrient levels…

I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and look at the birds-eye view of the website content as I close in on feature lock over the next couple of weeks. I wanted to make sure that the narratives are balanced, that the level of detail is where I want it, that…

I spent most of last week roughing out the code structure for the land use data. The broad-strokes development phase can be a lot of fun, because things come together so quickly, and you don’t have to focus on all of the details. Once it’s mostly-functioning and I can see where it needs to go,…

I’ve been working away on the last major data component of the thesis site this week. In the past couple of days, I’ve been updating the front page (of this module), to include all of the data. I haven’t taken the time sliders out of the page yet, but definitely plan to stick with a…

When my uncle passed away unexpectedly last October, I took on the responsibility of organizing a memorial service to honor his life. I wanted something that would capture his irreverent spirit, and that would honor his artwork as well. For the service itself, I designed a simple booklet with poems and readings to guide the service, and…

We’ve also been working on designing a site sign for the World Heritage project in my design synthesis class. The sign needs to show 100-150 words of text set in 7 different languages; the official languages of the UN, and the language for the country that the site is located in. My first sketch focused…