Hi! I’m Caia Sullivan, a senior about to graduate from SUNY New Paltz. Outside of being a designer, I love to read, workout with my little sister, and travel as much as I can. I’m also a big foodie and love trying new things, but I hate cheese, which has made yellow one of the colors that I use the least. Although I am not as much of a multimedia artist, I took a Basic Metal class in college, and one of my goals is to learn more about creating things out of metal and incorporating that into my design work.

This is my first data visualization class, and I’ve learned so much from Professor Josh Korenblat. Previously, I had only used the data tools on Adobe Illustrator, but Josh has taught me so many ways to push the boundaries of data visualization. Although I am still learning Tableau, it’s been an incredibly helpful resource in sorting and visualizing data. However, the biggest skill I’ve gained from this class is how to tell a data story. Learning how to take a big spreadsheet and organize it into a concise story that anyone can understand has been my biggest achievement from this class.

My portfolio is meant to showcase the progress that I’ve made over the course of each project. I am a very ambitious designer, even when I didn’t know the software yet. Data Visualization has really encouraged me to think outside the box in terms of how I can show my story. Over the past semester, I have storyboarded a tablet game (something that I will be making a summer project, because I was very proud of it), made a concept for a fold-up map of deaf community research in Nigeria, and laser cut two acrylic pieces to show a data story for Thalassophobia—the fear of the ocean. The project that I refined is a mini zine on blockbuster movies from the very beginning of the semester. The data set was massive, so I chose to focus on the differences between audience and critic ratings. The data cleanup itself was very interesting, but visually, it could’ve been executed better. I chose to reformat it as an Apple News story/visual on an Apple Watch, simply because I wanted to see what I could do on a smaller screen. I know what Apple News looks like on a phone, but what would it look like to scroll through an article on a 46 mm screen?

My final screens