Karl Gude

Nervous doesn't even begin to describe the feeling that I had that awful day. My knees shook, my mouth went dry and all of a sudden I had to use the bathroom. The crowd was so large it terrified me. My mind drew a complete blank. And to top it all off, the person who loaded my slides did so pell-mell, without any thought to the strict order that I had requested. The slide show was to be my rock, my order, my salvation. But what first appeared on-screen before me was slide number 18, not one, followed by six, then maybe 23. Complete chaos. I was lost. I'd been hit and the plane was going down. Still, I trudged on.

Bad idea...

It was my first public speaking/teaching experience in the field of information graphics (I've never like the word "INFOgraphics." It sounds trivializing, like a product from the 60s when they put an "o" at the end of everything to make it more palatable, like FIXOdent or BORAXO powder or BRILLO pads.) In the early 1980s when I was the Graphics Director at a then-thriving United Press International I was asked by the New England Newspaper Association to lecture on how a small paper with no graphics department could still produce basic graphics using things like photos and store-bought maps. It was my first invitation to speak about what I did every day.

By the end of my disastrous presentation, I swept the perspiration from my brow for the hundredth time, loosened my new tie and asked if there were any questions. Nothing. Finally someone stood up and broke the silence with this annoyed-sounding question, which still haunts me every time I prepare a lecture: "Karl, would you please tell us just ONE way that we can make a good graphic with limited resources?" Complete and total annihilation...crash...burn.

Now, 25 years later, I'm swimming in piles of reference books, notes, sketches, articles and graphics I've collected during my career in visual journalism. The stuff from the 70s and early 80s looks embarrassingly simplistic, but I still love it. Some of the newer materials are embarrassingly complicated. But I still love them. I have to pull together a curriculum for my Fall information graphics classes at Michigan State’s School of Journalism and this is my idea farm. I want the students to learn a LOT. My knees are still shaking, but not so much. Thank God for PowerPoint and the demise of the slide projector.

But what to teach...?

Mapping?…I can’t just breeze through mapping…too many cool ways to map nowadays, y'know. And online animation...must teach animation. Hmmm, but not this time around. First I have to get a handle on it myself. Good. I’ve always wanted to. And charting…whoa… Editors don’t just want little bar charts anymore. Now, it’s like “can you anchor the whole page with statistics?" And 3D? Oh God.

Producing maps, charts and cutaway diagrams is only the beginning. To be the best I want my students to master design theory, the layering of information and the use of color and typography. They should become super skillful illustrators, too, who understand the concept of perspective and drama. At the very least they have to dazzle an employer with their command of Illustrator, PhotoShop and InDesign. (At Newsweek we used Quark…forget that.) Also, 3D software like Maya, web programs like Flash and Dreamweaver, GIS mapping software like ArcView for data maps, Natural Scene Designer for manipulating digital elevation models and satellite imagery and Geocart for drawing various cartographic projections and adding elevation. Google Earth, too. And Excel for charting and number crunching. Can't ignore photography... Did I forget anything? Damn, some of this stuff I have to learn to teach it.

Then there’s the brain stuff they need to know. They have to become wizards at research, reporting and writing. They have to learn which information can be visualized and which can’t. They have to be good editors, too. Prioritize. Focus. I’m the king of trying to cram all of my fabulously impressive and hard-won research into a tiny, over-stuffed sausage of a graphic.

People stuff, too, is critical to know, like getting along in a tense newsroom…and it gets TENSE. It’s an art form talking an overworked, stressed out, graphic-loathing editor (fortunately, there aren’t many) into carving out space in the middle of their guarded grey matter to wedge a graphic into. I worked at one place where half of the sports department dove under their desks every time they saw me coming. They were afraid I might ask them for something, which meant extra work. I understood, though. We're all busy enough. In the end that very same department gave up a coveted press credential and insisted I go with them to cover the Barcelona Olympics. (It was strategic on their part, really...if I were there with them they wouldn't have to constantly feed me stuff.) Chalk one up to diplomacy!

Salesmanship’s useful, too. The students will have to talk the journalists’ game. Go to meetings. Win some respect. Know their editors' and writers' subjects and anticipate their needs. Read up on politics, business and international news, the latest in science, sports, medicine and the arts. It’s okay to admit that you don’t know about stuff sometimes, but not all of the time. In other words, be a journalist.

Now, I just have to figure out how to cram all of this fabulously impressive content into an over-stuffed sausage of a curriculum. Prioritize, focus!

I couldn’t shoot Angel. I’d never killed anything that big before (just bugs, worms…). When Bill and I entered the barn she was the only cow that wouldn’t stand up for her meal. There was a dead newborn calf behind her and another one bouncing around the barn on long wobbly stick-legs. Twins. That morning Angel, one of the biggest and sweetest Holsteins on the farm, had sunken eyes and looked like she was in a lot of pain. A mystery to me…

We summoned the vet who told us that, near as he could figure it, Angel, a first-calf heifer, had given birth to the first calf, which tired her. Exhausted, she took a rest when the second one was only halfway out of her, which pinched the calf tight around its lungs causing it to suffocate. The calf kicked like mad to get out. Angel’s uterus was shredded, like paper.

So, we had to put her out of her misery. I still feel bad about it, too. Bill took the gun from my hand and fired before he lost his nerve and before I had a chance to think. Angel’s rope harness was gripped tightly in my hands just under her chin to keep her head up so that she wouldn’t lie down and the .357 was just inches from my head when it went of. It was incredibly loud and instantly I was on the ground with Angel on top of me. Nearly deaf, I yelled at Bill like there was no tomorrow.

That was the day I got into journalism, although I didn’t know it at the time. After two years in Vermont I’d had it with farming. I’d delivered 27 calves and most had gone fairly well. There were good times, but I was tired of the seven-day weeks, the death and the physical toll on my body (sounds like I’m describing my last job!). Plus, I had tried so many other jobs. A month later I was on a train to New York City, a place I’d never been, to try my hand as an artist.

We all have our stories. I’m still in shock that I ultimately made it to Newsweek and now to the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. By ALL measures in this life I should have been a carpenter or maybe even a jackhammer operator.

I liked the jackhammer. Power at your fingertips. I tore up a huge tennis court parking lot in the Bay area with a creepy guy named Vito Cañada. His real name was Tom, but he wanted to be a pro tennis player so he made up a name that would make him sound like one. He even operated the hammer in tennis shorts sometimes, which looked pretty stupid. They’d get torn up by the end of a week. I’d go through a pair of gloves a day because the rubber handle vibrating against my grip would tear huge holes in them. At night I had to take aspirin because my teeth and gums hurt from gritting them so much.

Anyway, Tom/Vito annoyed me, so every day I tried, and always succeeded, in tearing up more asphalt parking lot than he did. I’d turn around at the end of the day and see my plowed-up chunks spreading farther than his. But my heart was in it. His wasn’t. I’m still competitive over silly things.

Before all this I’d taught English in Bogotá for a year or so and tried carpentry and factory work in L.A. But, in my head, the best thing I’d ever done was being the cartoonist for my high school paper.

So I sold my pickup truck in Vermont and used the money to move to New York City to try and be a children’s book illustrator. I was worried because I’d never studied art nor worked as an artist, but I loved drawing and did it all the time. I put a portfolio together using crayons I’d bought at an art store on Broadway because they were cheap.

As luck would have it, six weeks later, at age 23, I was the director of information graphics at United Press International overseeing a staff of three. I didn’t even know what an information graphic was…

Space Lab was orbiting above us and about to crash and burn back to earth back then. My editor asked me to do a graphic about this re-entry so I enthusiastically combined cutout photos of Earth and Skylab and airbrushed flames off the craft (everyone knows that things burn up when they re-enter the atmosphere!). It looked really cool, or so I thought, and I went home feeling pretty good…

…until I saw the Washington Post the next morning. They had done a graphic, too. No flames here! Maps of orbital patterns showed where SpaceLab’s debris might fall along with the percentages of likelihood in those areas. They may have even had a cutaway of the thing showing what it was like inside. My graphic was a joke and it had gone out to over a thousand newspapers on the UPI network. I wanted to die.

So, I was now delivering graphics instead of calves, and there would be many more to come that should have been aborted!