Am I recycling some Bluesky threads for the sake of a year-end post? I am. This stuff is also almost verbatim with what I posted on Instagram and LinkedIn too, but I’ve come to hate those sites/apps and moving forward I don’t intend to use them much. So, here we go with one of two mini-threads of Projects I Accomplished In 2024, my most lucrative (an *extremely* relative term) year as a freelance designer. First up: map illustration projects:
First project out the door in 2024 was this venue location map for the Riverside County Fairgrounds. The flex is that it was a rush job completed in less than two days (and charged for accordingly), while shuffling it with pre-project work for two other clients.
The second project (though first that I actually landed) this year was a referral for repeat business! Since these event venue cards were based on the SBCC Campus Maps I made in 2018 (and refined in 2023), they appear on that project page. Scroll all the way to the bottom for full details.
My third and most intense project from this year’s very busy Q1 was a series of map illustrations for the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI) and their timeline report on the 2023 Maui wildfire in Lahaina.
A busy Q1/Q2 settled into a quiet Q3, highlighted by this Storyteller’s Map for Inn at the Mission in San Juan Capistrano. I chased it down for months but it was great fun for this South OC native, and a good way to cement this year as Keirtography’s best yet.
The second group of Projects I Accomplished In 2024 is of 3 passion projects and 2 publication layouts:
First up, a quick midsummer passion project for a big milestone: July 2024 marked two decades of calling Ventura home, so I commemorated it with a quickie t-shirt design based on my 2018 “Ventura Neighborhoods” map. Next, a sort-of kickoff for what I hope will be my biggest 2025 project: a second “Nua Gazetteer” fantasy atlas, about a different region of my homebrew D&D world.
My amateur-music hobby stuck around this year with a compilation album of notable solo tunes, including one new one, and a quickie-minimalist cover design. Finally, two publication layout projects I cranked out for Good Jobs First: their “High Cost of Misconduct” report in April and their *huge* “Seeing Is Engaging” economic development transparency report in November.
Some 2024 project errata also includes this Tumblr blog identity from February and a December project that got pushed to sometime in 2025, so maybe you’ll see that soon [Update: it’s here!]. As for this past year, thanks to everyone who hired me or referred others to me for freelance design/map work in 2024.
So yeah, it was my “busiest,” but I’ve also never felt less employable—in the “work full-time for a company, organization, or institution” sense. But that may be a good thing, because I finally stopped worrying about it.
