Illustration
In marketing or advertising, illustration is meant to visually explain a concept or invoke an emotional response. Technical illustrations must be concise and easy to understand for the viewer. Often the most difficult part of technical illustrations is taking a client’s sketch and visually synthesizing it down to a more succinct form.
NIWeek Keynote Presentation Illustration

Cofounder and NI Business and Technology Fellow Jeff Kodosky needed a presentation to complement his annual NIWeek keynote. The presentation was projected on a 70-foot-tall video screen to an audience of over 2,500 attendees. It had to visually explain the highly technical nature of the topics, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Analog Data, and machine learning.
During the presentation, Kodosky used the human eye as an analogy to describe sensors, processing, and awareness in explaining the concept of IoT. He used this comparison to describe NI’s role in helping companies meet their engineering challenges.
During the presentation, Kodosky used the human eye as an analogy to describe sensors, processing, and awareness in explaining the concept of IoT. He used this comparison to describe NI’s role in helping companies meet their engineering challenges.
Matrix Net Systems Product and Service Illustration

Matrix Net Systems provides internet performance optimization solutions to companies that use the internet as a critical business service. It needed a technical illustration for a brochure that showed how its cloud-based system and products helped a business keep its internet running at peak performance.
NI TSN System Diagram

Engineers in NI’s Industrial Internet of Things Lab wanted to create a 3D mockup of a Time Sensitive Network (TSN) to show how NI and third-party products work together to create a flexible manufacturing ICC testbed. This required creating not only the illustrations for the large-format poster explaining the system but also a larger illustration of the system block diagram as the backdrop for the 3D system mockup.
London Underground Track Monitoring Illustration

The London Underground is using NI CompactRIO to monitor its Victoria rail line. NI needed a technical illustration demonstrating how the monitoring system works for a PowerPoint keynote presentation. The illustration was projected on a 70-foot-wide screen while an engineer on stage talked about how the system was built and implemented. The illustration showed how trains entering the station trigger a track circuit (red light) and trains leaving the station trigger a green light. Not only did the graphic elements need to be created for the presentation but they also had to be animated in PowerPoint.
Commercial Illustrations

Sometimes illustrations can be fun and whimsical. The illustrations below are examples of graphics used for a variety of applications such as social media graphics, invitations, announcements, and an illustrative exploration for a children’s book.
Something Fun!

*Warning 1980-90s Design Alert* — Though old school, these are still some of my favorite graphic works from my fledgling career in the late ’80s and early ’90s. If you’ve made it this far in my portfolio, you deserve a peek into the past. Keep in mind some of these were created with Adobe Illustrator 3.0, Photoshop 2.0, and Bryce 1.0.