Here’s wishing the happiest of VizEds birthdays to my pal Kevin Hand, 3-D artist for Newsweek magazine. Kevin turns 45 today (Saturday).
Let’s be honest here: If there was ever an outright genius in the field of infographics, then Kevin is it. He is unbelievably fast and incredibly good at visual storytelling.
I first met Kevin when he came to work for us in the graphics department of the Chicago Tribune. Chris Soprych sat directly across from me, Kevin sat to his right.
Yeah, that’s right. They hired Soapy and Kevin and me to work at the same newspaper. And they put all our desks together.
Probably not such a bright idea, in retrospect.
Man, did we bond. We bounced ideas off each other. We ate lunches together. We cried on each others’ shoulders when things didn’t go right.
Mostly, though, Chris and I laughed our asses off at the nutty things Kevin would come up with.
In addition to being a graphics genius, you see, Kevin also has a serious screw loose. Or, at least, it seems like it sometimes.
And don’t get me wrong: I love Kevin. But that’s one enormous sense of humor the man has.
And if you spend any time at all around Kevin, you have to be prepared for it.
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Kevin the visual journalist. This photo — and
most of the ones that follow — by Karl Gude.
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I worked with Kevin only a short time. But the memory that stands out the most for me is the year he was put in charge of assembling the Tribune’s entries for the annual SND contest. This was 1998; possibly 1999.
You know the drill: Kevin was charged with pulling all the pages, trimming and taping them together and attaching the forms. He neatly stacked them in piles, on the large counter that ran along the back wall of the department.
The next day, the pages were gone. Naturally, we assumed the hard-working Kevin had found a box big enough for the entries and had pulled yet another all-nighter packing them up.
But no, that’s not what happened. The overnight cleaning crew had seen the stacks of tearsheets, assumed they were trash and disposed of them.
You should have seen the look on Kevin’s face the next day.
The poor guy literally climbed into the dumpster behind the tower to salvage what he could. The rest, he had to compile again. On deadline.
Kevin the surfer dude.
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Another memory: In the days before Kevin was attached, he’d sometimes moan about not having a steady girlfriend. That was difficult for an old married guy like me to understand: A good lookin’ surfer dude like Kevin, with no girlfriend? You’re kidding me.
I once tried once to fix him up with a close friend in North Carolina. He was planning a trip to the Outer Banks. I suggested he swing by Raleigh and take her to dinner or something.
Naturally, Kevin was suspicious. What’s wrong with her? Personality disorder? Axe murderer? Her parents were cousins?
Perhaps Kevin has been on too many blind dates.
No, I told him, my friend is very nice and quite attractive. In fact, I had a major crush on her, myself.
Kevin was unmoved. So he blew off the opportunity.
Flash-forward years later, after I’ve moved to Des Moines and Kevin is in New York. We meet at the SND workshop in Minneapolis and decide to have dinner one night. I tell him my friend from North Carolina will join us. He raises his eyebrows at me: Is that the one…?
Yes, that’s her. You’ll finally get to meet her.
So we go to dinner and we’re having a great time. I notice Kevin keeps staring at her. I begin to get nervous. Surely, he’s not going to…
Suddenly, Kevin explodes.
“I’m sorry, but I just have to say this,” he blurts out. “Chuck is right! You’re gorgeous!”
I spit beer all over the table. And then I give his leg a swift kick. He probably still has the bruise.
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Rick Tuma toiled with us in the graphics department of the Tribune — in fact, he works there still.
Rick remembers Kevin’s practical jokes:
Kevin liked to keep his office seat as low to the floor as possible. This allowed him to almost hide from view in his cubicle and gave him the ability to easily prank me. I wear hearing aids and to answer the phone I need to activate a switch on the aid to engage the tell coil function (allows the phone to broadcast directly to the hearing aid from a short distance).
One evening, my phone rang and I adjusted the switch and put the phone against the hearing aid. My ‘hello’ was met with silence and eventually the dial tone of a disconnected line.
I put the phone down and went back to work. A while later the phone rang again and I followed my usual procedure to answer. Once again, there was silence followed by the dial tone.
Kevin the Klown.
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Growing suspicious, I looked around the room but everyone in the Graphics Department looked busy, including Kevin. I hung up the phone.
Kevin waited a longer time before ringing my phone a third time. Again, I adjusted the switch, answered the phone, heard nothing but silence and then the dial tone.
The heavens opened up and the clouds cleared away as I remembered we had a chronic prankster in the room. I stared directly at Kevin. After an initial denial he finally confessed. We had a good laugh and I good naturedly (well maybe not) lectured him on how he was causing my hearing aid switch to wear out prematurely.
It seems Kevin is never satisfied because soon after he left us to go to New York he pulled the same prank from a distance! Mercifully he kept it to two dead calls.
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Chris Soprych is now an AME of The Rockford Register-Star.
But, as I mentioned earlier, Chris spent many years as an artist at the Tribune:
Kevin “friendly-fired” me in the back a couple of times in paintball, he was an evil genius that way. Kevin could take any assignment and turn it into a good graphic, when I figure that out about him, I knew I had to try harder as an artist and journalist.
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Ken Marshall is graphics director of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. But ten years ago, he was a graphics coordinator for the Trib. He’d write ‘em and artists like Kevin, Rick, Soapy and I would knock ‘em out.
Ken recalls Kevin’s softer side:
I seem to remember there was flooding in his home town in Alabama late one winter in while we were in Chicago, and Kevin took off on his motorcycle.
I still imagine how cold he must have been trying to get down to be with them. You may be able to remember the details of what was going on.
Kevin is one really caring dude. I’m proud to have known him.
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Kevin the Evel Knievel wannabe and his pooch,
Imo. Kevin is the one with the helmet.
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Our supervisor at the Trib was Therese Shechter. Later, Therese moved to New York. I left in 1999 to become graphics editor of The Des Moines Register. Kevin left a year later to join Karl Gude’s staff at Newsweek.
Therese writes:
We were both new to New York and I invited him to come with me to the premiere party for the musical Aida. It was quite the scene. The enormous Roseland ballroom had been turned into this crazy Egyptian party palace. There were tons of celebs there, including Sir Elton John.
But the person that got Kevin most excited was Susan Lucci from All My Children. He was determined to say hello, and even after I begged him to leave her alone, he ran up to her and began an extended gushing session. I was mortified — true New Yorkers are blasé about celebrities!
I had no idea he was such a soap fan — he claimed it was his mom that was the fan. Uh Huh.
Well, Ms Lucci just stared at him like a deer caught in the Hand headlights while he went on and on. Finally, her security detail managed put himself between her and Kevin, thus ending the one-sided conversation.
Kevin was excited for weeks — heck, he may still be excited — and I’ll always admire his nerve for just going for it. There may or may not be a restraining order on him as I write this.
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John Grimwade of Condé Nast Publications has spoken on several panels with Kevin.
John’s fondest memory:
When I invited Kevin to speak to some students at [Condé Nast’s] brand-new cherry wood auditorium, I didn’t really allow for the full force of the cream-pie-in-the-face routine. So when Karl Gude and Kevin started putting down trash bags on the floor near the podium, I started to worry.
The rest is best left to history, but I’ll just note that I recently finished my three-year ban from using company facilities.
When I told Jeff Goerzten the details, he laughed until he cried.
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John Corbitt, now a free-lance illustrator and graphics gun but who has worked for Time, The St. Petersburg Times and here at The Virginian-Pilot, has also spoken to various groups alongside Kevin. With similar results:
I’m trying hard to forget the last time I spent time with Kevin. But it’s too terrible to bear on my own. I’ve got to tell the world.
We were in St. Petersburg last year for a Poynter presentation. He invited me to his hotel room and forced me to dress up in a chicken costume.
My mind has mercifully blocked out the rest of what happened.
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At Newsweek, Kevin worked with Tonia Cowan. Tonia is now the graphics editor of the Toronto Globe & Mail.
She, too, remembers Kevin’s practical jokes. But her fondest memory is of retaliation:
Kevin’s dedication to his job allowed me, once in the whole time I’ve known him, the upper hand in our prank war. (Never, never get involved in a prank war with Kevin.)
He had been up all night, as usual, working on a 3D Baghdad street in Lightwave. It finished rendering while he was away from his desk.
I saved the file and made a full screen “sad Mac” image for his computer. I don’t think Macs have used that as a crash icon for ten years, but it was enough to fool our sleepy friend. When he came back and his blood pressure peaked, I told him that “Karl had just been looking for a file on your computer… is there a problem?”
He marched into Karl’s office, a ball of barely-contained fury (Karl had no idea why) and I’m thinking, “Oh no. I’ve gone too far!”
But Kevin had more self-control than I thought, and was even able to be polite… once he was finally able to speak.
Kevin has gotten the better of me a hundred times, so I really enjoy that story.
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And lastly, we have Karl Gude, former art director of the Associated Press, of The National daily sports tab, of Newsweek.
Karl was Kevin’s boss for about seven years. Karl’s strongest memory, though, was their first meeting:
When I interviewed Kevin in my 16th floor midtown Manhattan office for the job at Newsweek, Kevin was dressed in a suit — a rare event.
We were both trying to act professionally. I wanted him to like it there so he’d come work for me, and he wanted me to like him so that I’d offer him the job.
But halfway through the interview, something happened that demolished any pretense of professionalism and set the mold for how we would behave with each other for years to come.
Behind Kevin, just over his shoulder, through the window, in the apartment building across the street, fully visible and extremely distracting, was a couple in engaged in — well, you know.
He became clearly aware of my distraction.
After about five minutes of fighting a losing battle to discuss Kevin’s fantastic work and to not look out that window, I finally apologized to him. “Look!” I said, and pointed out the window.
That was it. Interview over. We laughed like a couple of schoolboys until our sides ached.
When Kevin’s around, life somehow just turns out more magical.
To commemorate Kevin’s 45th birthday, Karl built this little video presentation.
I couldn’t get the video embedded here properly. So please follow this link.
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No one who witnessed the Graphics Iron Chef at the San Jose workshop in 2004 can forget the performance of Team 3D, consisting of Kevin and Tonia Cowan. Kevin is the guy who attempted to distract his competitors by hiring an Elvis impersonator.
Video blogs starring Kevin were the highlights of the Feb. 2006 SND contest judging in Syracuse. Kevin also provided some of the best lines in SND’s 25 Influential Moments in News Design DVD, a few years ago.
“Dude, I’m only the comedy relief,” Kevin sheepishly told me once about that DVD. He didn’t think he came off as particularly knowledgable.
You have to be kidding, I told him. You had all the best lines. Six weeks after they watch the video, you’ll be what they remember.
I’m not sure I made him feel any better. But that’s Kevin: Always wanting to do something memorable.
Here are a few samples of Kevin’s memorable work:
Find Kevin’s personal porfolio site here.
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A child of the 70s, Kev shares a birthday with a bevy of 70s icons: Bonnie Hunt, Scott Baio, Joan Jett, Debby Boone and Tommy Lasorda.
In addition, today is Dear Diary Day. Seriously.
Have a terrific 45th birthday, Kevin, my friend. Best wishes!
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