Charles Apple

Here’s wishing the happiest of VizEds birthdays to my good friend and colleague Robert D. Voros, a graphic artist here at The Virginian-Pilot. Bob turns 41 today.

Bob in his cube at the Pilot. You can tell this
photo is 3+ years old — Horrors! — that’s a
Mac sitting behind him on his desk.
—

In the quarter-century or so I’ve spent in journalism, I’ve never met anyone who works harder or with more passion than Bob.

The good news: You can be sure that, whatever he works on, will be done right.

The bad news: I think the poor guy hardly ever goes home sometimes. Seriously, the Pilot’s looking for new revenue streams; perhaps they ought to keep an eye on him. The Pilot might want to charge Bob rent.

Bob is good at making sense of any kind of complex material, but he has an especially fine touch with maps. One of my proudest moments as Bob’s boss was when he won an SND award in the Infographics/Maps category a couple of years ago for a particularly complicated story he helped untangle.

Bob’s first love, however, is sports graphics. Point him at a story and give him some space; he’ll dig up something visually interesting and build a graphic for you. He assembles most of the Pilot’s Redskins and NFL game day pages, our Super Bowl graphics and our annual fantasy football guide.

Bob is a superb visual journalist and a good friend.

A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Bob worked at the Syracuse paper and in San Antonio before joining the Pilot in 1993.

A few samples of his work:

Find more in his NewsPageDesigner portfolio.

Bob shares a birthday with Jen Hiatt of The St. Petersburg Times, sports figures Pat Riley and Bobby Orr, supermodel Kathy Ireland, actors William Hurt, Holly Hunter and Carl Reiner and late TV star Fred “Mr. Rogers” Rogers.

Plus, today is Proposal Day and it’s also Festival of Extraterrestrial Abductions Day. Seriously.

So don’t just sit there. Go ask an alien to marry you!

Happy birthday, Bob! Crawl out from under your desk tonight and celebrate, my friend!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 7:39 am and is filed under Graphics, Happy birthday, Virginian-Pilot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.