Category Archives: Digital Illustration

Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University Magazine Illustrations

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I just completed an illustration project for the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. They publish a quarterly magazine for alumni and interested subscribers featuring various activities, events and accomplishments of the school and its alumni.

The Fall 2011 issue features 5 alumni who are involved in what the article calls “impact investing.” That cover story and article titled “Investing in Solutions” highlights how these featured alumni are tackling some of the world’s biggest problems – and satisfying the bottom line at the same time.

Kellog Magazine Cover Illustration

Kellogg Magazine Cover Illustration

Kellogg Magazine Cover Illustration

Feature Article on Equilibrium Capital Group

Opportunities in Green Real Estate

Opportunities in Green Real Estate

Feature Article on Affordable Housing

Opportunities to Preserve Affordable Rental Housing

Opportunities to Preserve Affordable Rental Housing

Global Impact Investing Network

Graph made with Words

Transforming the way we think about solutions to problems.

Microfinance and Microlending to Poor African Farmers

Opportunities to microfinance poor farmers

Opportunities to microfinance poor farmers

Establishing Metrics for Effective Impact

Establishing metrics for more effective solutions

Opportunities for establishing metrics for more effective solutions

MetLife Asset Transfer Kit Tower Illustration

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Randal Birkey created this Adobe Illustrator vector-based illustration of a high-rise tower building for use on the cover of a MetLife Asset Transfer Kit, through a New York City ad agency. This style of architectural illustration is called an axonometric. The footprint of the building is drawn to scale and proportion (width and depth). The third dimension (height) is created by popping up off the footprint at a consistent angle, all of the vertical elements. There are no perspective or foreshortened lines in the illustration, yet it delivers a 3D aerial perspective visual sense to the viewer. This copyrighted work was done in 1995.

MetLife Tower - Adobe Illustrator vector art

MetLife Tower - Adobe Illustrator - Digital Vector Art

Shands Healthcare Campus Map and Floor Plans

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Randal was contacted through his new web design firm by Shands Healthcare in Gainsville, Florida. This organization is affiliated with the University of Florida, and located near its medical research facility. Shands has recently completed the construction of a new cancer hospital and needed to add some new floor plans and campus map illustrations to their existing website at www.shands.org.

Randal and Taylor Birkey worked from engineering drawings and references supplied by the hospital to create a series of floor plans and a campus map illustration using Adobe Illustrator software on Apple Macintosh computers.

Shands Healthcare Campus Map

Shands Healthcare Campus Map

Shands Healthcare - Floor Plan 1

Shands Healthcare - Floor Plan 1

Shands Healthcare - Floor Plan 3

Shands Healthcare - Floor Plan 3

The illustrations will be used for both print and web applications.

The Sustainable City Update

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The Home Depot Foundation has completed the updated Sustainable Cities Institute website which I wrote about in a previous post, and can now be found online here.

Randal Birkey created the base map illustration that the interactive Flash application is structured around.

Sustainable Cities Map

Sustainable Cities Map - illustration by Randal Birkey

Randal also created the site plan for the City Hall section of the application.

Sustainable City - City Hall Floor Plan

Sustainable City - City Hall Floor Plan - Randal Birkey Illustration

Finally, he created the view of how transportation could be integrated in more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways by city and urban planners.

Sustainable City Transportation

Sustainable City Transportation - Randal Birkey Illustration

Maggiano’s Restaurant

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I recently had a meeting at my office with food catered in by Maggiano’s… an Italian Restaurant in the Chicago area. It reminded me that I did some illustration work for the parent company, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises (LEYE), back in the 1990′s. Here is one such grayscale line and wash illustration done digitally in Painter software, using an Apple Mac and Wacom tablet.

Maggiano's Restaurant

Maggiano's Restaurant - Street View Scene

Christmas Card Illustration for Northwestern University Medical Center

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Randal has been asked to do many Christmas card illustrations over the years for Northwestern University. Most of them have featured one of their buildings with some kind of Christmas ornamentation added for the holiday spirit. This illustration features the entrance to a building on the Chicago medical campus located at 300 E. Superior in Chicago, Illinois. It is a line drawing with watercolor and color pencil washes. It is a hybrid of hand drawn line art scanned into a Mac and then touched up and tinted digitally with Corel Painter software.

Northwestern University Medical Center - Chicago

Northwestern University Medical Center - Chicago

San Francisco CityFlash Street Map

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San Francisco CityFlash Street Map

San Francisco CityFlash Street Map

This is a detail section of a San Francisco Street Map that Randal Birkey produced for Rand McNally/Hallwag in 1989 as part of their CityFlash Map product line. This was the first Rand McNally map product produced on desktop computers. Randal and his team used Apple Macintosh FX, CX and CI computers running Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand software.

The street map portion of each CityFlash Map included street level details such as street names, locations of post offices, hospitals, banks, theaters, pharmacies and illustrated points of interest. Also included were vicinity maps, shopping center maps, public transportation system maps, all in an easy-to-use, two-sided folded format.

Other cities produced were Chicago, New York, Washington D.C. and Boston.

Chicago CityFlash Street Map

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Chicago CityFlash Street Map

Chicago CityFlash Street Map

This Street Map of Chicago was produced by Randal Birkey and his team as a part of an entire new map product line for Rand McNally in 1989. This was the first product line offered by a partnership of Rand McNally and Hallwag, called CityFlash Maps, produced completely digitally on desktop computers comprised of Apple Macintosh FX and CX computers running then current versions of Aldus Freehand and Adobe Illustrator.

The software used produced vector Postscript files which were supplied to the printer, converted to 4-color process film (CMYK) and plates, then used for 4-color offset printing.

5 US cities were completed as a part of the CityFlash product project:

  • Chicago
  • New York
  • Boston
  • San Fransisco
  • Washington, D.C.

For each city map product, the team produced a range of maps including: street level detail maps including points of interest like this one, public transportation maps, and shopping district maps.