If you haven't heard of Troubadour Research and Consulting they deal in market research, big data, and strategy consulting. Mostly they are comprised of smart people who kill at Geeks Who Drink. Example of a winning team name: "That's How You Get Ants-wers". We have worked together quite a bit. They translate data into visual storytelling and need an occasional assist from an illustrator with a background in sequential art (that's me).

As a result I get to work on fun projects like this one where they calculate how various people feel about wearing technology, like a smartwatch or google glasses, and I make drawings that match the data. They put the two together and created a cool app for their clients. Fun right?!

My favorite part is the sketching stage. They ask for a particular kind of person, let's say a "Cool guy living in a big city" and I get to ask, "Are we talking Austin cool? Waris Ahluwalia jetset cool? Or more Paul Bettany in a skinny scarf?"

They check the numbers and we narrow it down until we get something like this:

I have an ulterior motive for posting this. I was recently at a party and noticed that when folks ask the classic party question, "How's work?" I reflexively blathered on about about data and visual storytelling until their eyes went dead. Now, I'm just gonna send this link.