Latest Posts
I just got back from the NICAR conference in St. Louis, where I gave a talk with Bill Keaggy on Best Visualization Practices. There’s delicious stack of links here: http://bit.ly/nicar2012 and the presentation is here (click the settings gear and open speaker notes to find out what we talked about):
Chrys Wu kept a detailed list of links if you want to check out some of the other sessions. I also got the see the St. Louis arch! Very exciting:
Kat Downs
February 26, 2012
Information Graphics, Travel, Workcharts, Design and infographics, missouri, nicar, presentations, st. louis, Travel
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It’s been a busy few months, but I’m gonna squeeze in a post for January! I’ve switched jobs at the Post and moved into a new role, Interactive Projects Editor, focusing on creating interactive projects that combine design and graphics with video, photography and social media. I’m really looking forward to the new challenge. In other news, I’m getting used to the new delicious and trying out this ‘stacks’ thing. I’ve got a few going, namely one on interactive maps and one for games and quizzes. I’ll keep those updated as I collect links around the web. And, some of my recent work….
Pinocchio tracker
The tracker part of this was originally done with Tableau, but we decided to rework it and to add a game element to it. It’s on a page of its own as well as in the right rail on all our politics content. Try it out!
The Media Divide
This piece was born from a project by Marc Fisher to track what media people consume in a day and see how it reflects their ideology. Evelio Contreras did this great video and we put it together in a calendar with links to all the news they watched/read/listened to, and combined that with a poll.
The Seat Pleasant 59
This project leads with Whitney Shefte’s awesome video about a class of students who were promised that if they graduated from high school, their college would be paid for. We tracked down the students and found out where they are now. My contribution was the list/grid view and filtering along with itemizing content for each of the dreamers.
Kat Downs
January 31, 2012
Multimedia, Workamanda zamora, delicious, Design and infographics, evelio contreras, factcheck, game, graphics, interactive, jobs, links, local, marc fisher, Multimedia, politics, poll, userdata, video, washingtonpost.com, Whitney Shefte, Work
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An excerpt of my post about our new project on the WP innovations blog:
This is one of the first projects to take users opinions and mash them up with actual data to see whether perceptions match up with reality. It’s a fascinating window into how people feel about the places where they live and a forum for a conversation around how things are changing.
There are already some patterns emerging. We are starting to see that, in general, more states with high unemployment are being rated ‘worse’ by users, and more places with low unemployment are being rated ‘better’.
D.C. stands out – though unemployment is high, 83 percent of users (as of publication of this post) ranked it better. One left a comment after rating it ‘better’: “DC is better due to a higher number of permanent residents, community activism, and better stewardship. Welcome to the 21st century!” The comments on why people voted the way they did have been some of the most interesting results of the project we’ve seen so far.
Read more of this post at @innovations »
Kat Downs
November 4, 2011
Projectscensus, dankeating, Design and infographics, infographics, ugc, unemployment, usergeneratedgraphics, washingtonpost.com, Work
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In an extremely quick turnaround, I worked with Dan Keating to create this tool that shows you the breakdown of what other people of your age, race, and location make each year. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to improve it and add some more metrics, but it’s pretty cool for taking less than a day!
Kat Downs
September 28, 2011
Information Graphicsacs, census, charts, Dan Keating, data, income, infographics, The Washington Post
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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.
Kat Downs
September 19, 2011
Information Graphicsexercise, games, health, illustration, interactive, laura stanton, Multimedia, polls, sohail al-jamea, video, voting
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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 »
Kat Downs
September 18, 2011
Multimedia3-D, features, fun, games, google earth, google street view, Karen Yourish, laura stanton, motion graphics, royal wedding, The Washington Post
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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.
Kat Downs
September 18, 2011
Information Graphicsalicia parlapiano, basketball, charts, css, Design and infographics, heather billings, infographics, javascript, Karen Yourish, laura stanton, nba, politics, sports, taxes, The Washington Post, unemployment, Work
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My first shot at iPhone photography. I found it really fun — I love the filters and the size of the phone makes it easy to carry around. I was mostly using Hipstamatic and Instagram, and shot a few panoramas with the Photosynth app. To see the full gallery, go here.
Most of these were taken in New Hampshire (Lake Winnepesaukee and Portsmouth), Boston, and Hendersonville, N.C. Here’s a shot of Mt. Major near Alton Bay, N.H. Click the image to enlarge.
Kat Downs
August 24, 2011
Photography and multimedia, Travelfilters, iphone, Photography and multimedia, technology, Travel
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