Charles Apple

Here’s wishing the happiest of VizEds birthdays to Kris Kinkade, design editor of The Kalamazoo Gazette in Kalamazoo, Mich. Kris turns 41 today.

Kris Kinkade on the slopes. Photo
stolen from his FaceBook page.
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Kris has been at the Gazette (Newhouse; 75,000 daily) for more than 12 years, directing the paper’s design, building prototypes for redesigns and supervising seven designers and also, indirectly, six copy editors. According to his official bio, Kris previously worked at small papers in Kokomo and in South Carolina.

Kris is a 1989 graduate of Northern Kentucky University. That would be the fighting Norse. I had never heard of them, either. At first, I figured that mascot was simply loud — such as Quiet Riot’s “Cum on, Feel the Norse.”

But I was mistaken. And, I digress.

Kris and I demolish a couple of beers in Orlando,
2006. Photo stolen from someone’s Flickr feed.
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Kris and I go way back — all the way to the 2000 SND Annual Workshop in Minneapolis. We were assigned to the same team during Jeff Goertzen and John Grimwade’s infographics class. I somehow got elected the leader of the team, but Kris impressed the hell out of me with his quick thinking and his solid, content-driven solutions. It was the kind of situation any manager loves: I sat back, shut up and let Kris make me look smart.

The next spring, at an SND quickcourse in St. Louis, Kris introduced me to his wife, Jan and their daughter, Baylee, who was riding in a stroller.

Kris and Baylee — I’m guessing this was taken
in Orlando in 2006. This photo, too, is stolen
from a source I can no longer recall.
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I’ve run into the three of them several times since. I felt old when I discovered how much Baylee had grown up when I had dinner with them in Boston.

When my own daughter, Elizabeth, joined Facebook a couple weeks ago, Kris was one of the first folks who “friended” her. Elizabeth was so excited.

In February, Kris coordinated the judging for the 28th edition of the annual Society for News Design contest. Then he rushed home to complete a fabulous redesign of his paper.

Kris sorts SND entries that were entered in the wrong
categories, February 2007. Photo by Matt Erickson.
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Here’s one of the more clever things I saw last year. Lots of us talk about Alternative Story Forms and how to present boring, narrative-type text in graphic ways, but Kris found a way to build an ASF into his paper’s redesign:

As he explains:

I took what was a 30-50 inch narrative story about court sentencings in the county and reconfigured it as a graphic chart. All the same info is there but it is now so much easier to digest and find out what is important to me. I can easily scan for different communities, streets, names, offenses, where infractions occurred and what judge handed out the sentence. If I want to track which judges are being tough and which ones are giving out light sentences, this chart makes it easy. It takes up about the same amount of space, the template I created means the reporter is not doing any more work to enter the information and it breaks up what was a very gray story.

A few more samples of Kris’ work:

Find even more, of course, in his NewsPageDesigner portfolio.

Kris shares a birthday with Sir Isaac Newton, actor Dave Foley, singer Michael Stipe, politician Dan Quayle and entertainer Charles Stratton – better known as Gen. Tom Thumb.

In addition, today is National Trivia Day. Seriously.

Best wishes for a happy birthday, Kris!

Overnight, Ft. Lauderdale design director Paul Wallen made good on a promise to give us dibs on an announcement of his summer design intern.

Straight from da big W himself:

Nicole Davis has accepted a 2008 summer design internship at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Nicole Davis, right, hangs with Northwestern’s
Stephanie Yiu at SND/Boston in October.
Photo from the SND Update Blog.
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Nicole will graduate in June 2008 from Ohio University, where she has been a leader in the visual communications program and at the school paper, The Post.

She was a student facilitator at the SND judging in Syracuse this past February and was a finalist in The Intern competition at the 2007 SND Workshop in Boston.

A few samples of Nicole’s work:

     

You can find Nicole’s portfolio here.

Paul goes on:

We’re very happy Nicole accepted our internship offer and excited about working with her this summer. Nicole’s talent is apparent in her work, but we were also impressed by her dedication, energy and eagerness to keep growing. Facilitating in Syracuse is a great learning opportunity and it was clear that Nicole put that experience to use in her work. Of course, learning about design from Ohio University’s Julie Elman is a pretty good way to go too! Nicole is bright, articulate and outgoing. We think she’ll fit in great at the Sun-Sentinel!

Nicole was born in San Franciso and grew up in Cleveland. She enjoys crafts, scrapbooking and taking photos.

To learn more about Nicole, including why she calls herself a “dork,” check out this Region 4 Spotlight interview with Matt Erickson.

Congratulations, Nicole! Well-done!

Anyone else out there have internships to announce? Bring ‘em on.

I failed to reload my Canon software after my hard drive went down earlier this year. And I didn’t have a card reader with me. So I’m just now posting my photos from my Atlanta trip:

The Tuesday crowd was slightly larger than the Wednesday morning one. The woman in green in the left center is AJC print design manager Patty Murphy. The guy in the center with the tie is Kris Jensen of the AJC’s Gannett News section.

Here, Graham Kimbrough of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, prepares to introduce me for the Wednesday morning session.

Albert Einstein is stalking me.

Dee Dee D’Asaro finds my comments amusing, but Kenny Monteith won’t even crack a smile. Typical.

My new show, “The Art of Being Brilliant,” clocked in at 90 minutes each of the two times I gave it, despite the fact I worked on it up to the last minute.

My thanks to the fine folks of the AJC and their guests from the SNPA. They were a fine audience.

And my apologies to my good friend Joanne Sosangelis, graphics editor of the AJC. She sat through the session twice. That had to be boring.