A workout at work and/or my 15 minutes of fame

To create this graphic about exercises you can do at the office, the entire graphics department of the Post got together twice a day to do the exercises. It was a hilarious group activity — we attracted a lot of stares from passersby in the newsroom. I really enjoyed jumping around a little bit in the middle of the day to get the blood pumping.

The graphic was a fun collaboration between Laura Stanton, who illustrated many of the department members, Sohail Al-Jamea, who created the animations, Bonnie Berkowitz, who was our exercise leader and researched and wrote all the text and conducted the survey, and me — I helped design and build the interactive and set up the videos and polls.

So far we have had a lot of people voting — about 1,700 for the first exercise. It’s fun to see how people have responded to each exercise, and we’re hoping it is promoting engagement with the piece.

Royal rumors (and some graphics fun)

With Kate and Will back in the news for the rumors about a pregnancy with twins (not true, by the way), I thought, “Hey, what better opportunity to make up for the fact that I never wrote about our royal wedding graphics on the blog?” So here I am. Royal couple junkies, enjoy. And if you’re a true royal wedding fanatic, you might enjoy this video about my roommate, coincidentally also named Kate Middleton (this one is true).

The main piece I worked on was the Westminster Abbey and parade route tour. Sohail Al-Jamea and Alberto Cuadra worked together on the 3-D renderings and animations, and I layered on the interactivity and created the Google Earth flyovers and, with help from Laris Karklis, the parade route maps and Street View layers.

Continue to see how we made the interactive parade route, and how we created 3 types of javascript quizzes »

Analyzing the U.S. tax code, break by break, and other recent charts

Today, we came out with a new graphic that looks at the tax breaks on the books this year. It is part of Running in the Red, a series the Post has been running for the past few months, and accompanied Lori Montgomery’s front-page story, “Ever-increasing tax breaks for U.S. families eclipse benefits for special interests,” a great story that explains spending through the tax code.

The graphic is all CSS and JavaScript. With charts that only have bars, it’s simple to dynamically add sized divs with background colors that create charts. The data will update automatically if necessary and it works across all browsers and mobile platforms with no workarounds:

And has details for each of the 172 breaks currently active (see below). Added bonus: I learned a ton about the tax code.

And a couple more (relatively) recent charts:

This one I worked on with Alicia Parlapiano and Neil Irwin. Because I wanted to create animate transitions and interactivity, I used Flash to create this graphic. It has detailed drilldowns to look at employment in each sector of the economy. I tried to inject more annotation into this graphic (and the taxes one above) than we have done in the past with data-driven graphics. Instead of throwing a bunch of data out there, we’re providing more context and guided views — by category and by sector versus a completely self-guided data dive.

This was a fun chart I helped our intern, Heather Billings, with at the beginning of the summer. We used flot to make these charts showing how the lead changed between the Heat and the Mavericks during the NBA finals. This was particularly fun for me because I got really into the NBA finals this year and watched every game. I know, hard to believe, but true. I was a having a great time analyzing the outcome of the games and reading all the news — and if you missed it, this was a great article from Bill Simmons at Grantland.

And another one about when and if China’s economy will pass the United States to become the world’s largest.