Print versus online
Increasingly we need to make web versions of graphics that were originally prepared for print publication, and the expectation for the future is that we will create content for the web first and for print second, if at all.

Most of my career has been in print graphics, since that is where newspapers have been most profitable (and still are.) In the past, if there was going to be a web version of a graphic, someone in another department would take my work and convert it. The web and print operations were mostly separate. That's changing now for all but the largest papers. But the reality of having art departments, whose staff in most cases have already been pared back, take on the extra work of making two versions of graphics forces compromises in scope and ambition. So our interactive versions tend to be simple and quick, mostly the same as the print version but with rollover or click buttons to call out some additional information or images.

Orange County 8,500 years ago
More than 100,000 artifacts found on a mesa in Huntington Beach have provided insight into the lives of people who lived there in the prehistoric past. Register reporter Cindy Carcamo and I talked to a Cal State Fullerton archaeologist in an effort to recreate what the village would have been like and how the people lived. I then made two versions of a graphic, one for print (which ran on A3 in black and white) and an interactive online version. The image was made with 3D modeling software.

Katie Wheeler Library
Katie was the granddaughter of James Irvine, who founded the Irvine Ranch, a 110,000-acre property which once covered almost a third of Orange County. This new public library branch which opened in February 2008 is a replica of the Irvine family's 1906 mansion, which burned down in 1965. Although not a large public building, it's a big enough deal for the county to make the cover of the Register's local section and the front page of the Irvine World News, a Register publication.
On the link to the print version, scroll down to see how ads are creeping onto the front pages of the newspaper.

Chapman University
This was for a Sunday centerpiece about a private college in the city of Orange that has seen considerable growth in the last forty years. To illustrate that, the graphic plan was to do a map showing the campus in 1967 and one showing it now. I expanded on that by making a 3D map from the building shapes and color-coding the original buildings red. Then I made an interactive version that would have either photos or captions pop up as the user rolls over the building shapes. Photos were from the University itself or from several of our photographers.

This one shows the obvious advantages of the online version — besides embedded photos, it has information about almost every building. The print version, limited to two columns, only has room for a few tags. It also ended up running black and white.

Subprime ground zero
This was a great investigative story that two of the Register's business reporters, John Gittelsohn and Ron Campbell, did on the fallout from the subprime lending crash. They researched and detailed one block of one street, Camile Street in Santa Ana, which has a high number of houses bought with subprime loans and an increasing number of defaults.