Charles Apple

Here’s wishing the happiest of VizEds birthdays to William Couch, a designer for USAToday.com. William turns 23 today (Sunday).

Couch live-blogs — I presume that’s what he’s
doing — last September at BarCamp Orlando,
a convention/workshop for multimedia folks.
Photo by Meagan Fisher.
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It’s been a busy year for the furnituremeister. He graduated from the University of Michigan last May; then served a fellowship at The Poynter Institute.

Immediately afterward, William was scheduled to began an internship at The Arizona Republic. However, Tracy Collins granted William a release when Bonita Burton came calling in July with a full-time multimedia gig at The Orlando Sentinel.

And then, a little more than a month ago, Couch leaped to USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va.

The main image from William’s promotional
campaign for the 2006 “The Intern” contest.
As you can see, he was not merely outstanding
in his field — he’s out sitting in it, too.
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Couch became a household name in the news design field with his imaginative campaign and easygoing manner as he competed in the first-annual “The Intern” contest at SND/Orlando in 2006. He didn’t win first place. But he sure made an impression.

William is just getting cranked up at USAToday.com. One notable piece he worked on that you might have noticed is this nifty interactive guide to the NFL draft.

Couch wrote about it last month in the USA Today interactive design blog:

Sports first approached our Design group about creating a way for draft picks to be plotted to a U.S. map, based on where the players went to high school and college.

As we started to work through the data, we thought it would also be valuable to see how many players each conference took over this time range as well. What has resulted is a four-tiered approach to breaking down the data. In the first two sections, you can examine, on a state level, which high schools and which colleges the players have come from, filtering for a number of factors.

In the third section, you get a chart plotting how many players each conference has selected by year, from 1988 to 2007, with the ability to filter down the numbers and toggle each conference line. In the fourth section, you can work through the entire database, again with a robust filter.

Perhaps what I enjoy most about this interactive is that while it’s based heavily on numbers and statistics, people who work with it will likely find trends and stories within the data, some that may be uniquely relevant to them.

Personally, I’m a recent Michigan alumnus and a native to the state; thus I’m curious to look at all of the players who’ve been drafted from Michigan, both as a college and a state, since 1988, a range that extends far beyond my time at the college. Moreover, I can compare those with rival schools in the Big Ten, and those we often compete against from other conferences.

William isn’t just a wonderful designer and multimedia producer — he’s also a gifted photographer. For example, take this shot, below, of a night space shuttle launch from two months ago.Go ahead. Take it. Loads of folks have enjoyed it via Digg and Reddit and Explore.

William describes the story behind it:

Decided, on a bit of a whim, to see the shuttle launch from the coast tonight (really, this morning), and, boy, I’m glad I did.

Due to the low cloud cover, the launch was apparently not visible from the city, which is surprising, considering that normal night launches light up the entire Central Florida sky. However, up close, the launch was visible for a few, stunning, seconds.

I considered cropping this, but was actually intrigued by the vast amount of empty night sky on the upper half. Kind of telling of the actual launch scene.

Check out William’s galleries at Flickr.

In fact, you might want to start with one of his most popular sets — one Couch calls Food Porn. I don’t know if he enjoys eating it, but he sure takes lots of pictures of it:

Just be warned. You’ll waste a lot of time looking and wondering why you can’t take pictures like his.

Couch doesn’t do print work any more. But when he did, it looked like this:

Find a few more of William’s print pieces in his NewsPageDesigner gallery. Check out his personal Web site here.

Couch butchers a pumpkin, October, 2007.
Photo by Jason Hawkins. Creepy-ass facial
expression by William Couch.
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William shares a birthday with singer Holly Valance, songwriter Irving Berlin, painter Salvador Dali, comedian Mort Sahl, U.S. Islamic leader Louis Farrakhan and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

In addition to being Mother’s Day, today is also Twilight Zone Day and Eat What You Want Day.

Best wishes for a great birthday, Mr. Furniture!