These are some quick reference guides I made for my dad, for Christmas.  I am posting it now because June is the next month after December, clearly.  So my dad has been hampered in working on his classic cars and rental properties with their myriad electrical problems because he’s never been exposed to the fundamentals of electricity.  I figured that what he needed in lieu of a formal physics course was a quick reference that he could refer to as needed.

I put together some original copy and graphics for each of the major concepts in electricity that were relevant to what he needs to do.  To make the final product, I then laminated each card and included a set of mini Sharpies to make notes on the back or circle key points or whatever.

There’s a lot more that could be done here from a graphic design standpoint, and as I was formatting them for web I found some errors in the material, but for a three-day project I’m pretty happy with how they came out.  PDFs, if you want to print out a set for yourself, are here, and you can download a zip of the photoshop files if you want to make some of your own here.

Also, can I parenthetically remark here that wikipedia is awful?  It’s written to sound like an encyclopedia, not to explain things clearly and accessibly, so it’s completely opaque on any conceptually difficult topic.  Yet when I want to really want to research something in depth, it only has the same shallow gloss of the subject that you’d find in a dead-tree encyclopedia.  Critiques of wikipedia usually revolve around concerns about quality of citations and bias, which misses the meat of the issue, that as a reference guide to anything except pop culture trivia it sucks.  Exhaustive scholarship on that Josh Whedon series though!