New version of Say What for debates went live yesterday:
Category: Work
Catching up on 2012
I’ve been completely delinquent about posting here. I will try to do better, and in the meantime, here is a selection of work from the first part of the year (am going to follow this up with some breakout posts on specific projects).
What’s at stake on Super Tuesday?
Going way back to Super Tuesday, we published this really fun motion graphic featuring Chris Cillizza and the delegate mountain that Todd Lindeman and Sisi Wei built. I worked on storyboarding it with the team, a well as helping in the studio (led by AJ Chavar and Sohail Al-Jamea) and with building out the page. The project was really fun and newsy, and a great job especially by animator Sohail, and of course Chris Cillizza.
Rescue and Recovery
This is a really powerful piece looking at Virginia Tech five years after the massacre, through the lens of an iconic image of survivor Kevin Sterne. I did design, development, audio and wrote one of the segments of the piece. I love the simplicity and amazing story. Again, an awesome team effort with work from Ben de la Cruz, Bill O’Leary, Josh du Lac and others:
Repairing the Washington Monument
This piece about the damage to the national icon just came out last week — featuring a 3-D model by Alberto Cuadra, and reporting by Cristina Rivero. Kathryn Faulkner, the summer intern in graphics, did most of the heavy lifting on the interactive side, with me in an editing role and pitching in to help with some of the tricky parts, like the rotating model. The piece turned out beautifully:
NICAR presentation on visualization
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:
New year, new post
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.
Recent projects: Remembering the decade and new timeline template
It’s been a little while since I updated the blog, so here are a couple of projects from the past month and a half that I think are pretty cool.
The first is a look back at the aughts that I worked on with Joel Achenbach, which was great because I’ve always admired his work and thought he was hilarious. I designed and build a fairly simple panel graphic that has collages of some major things that happened in the 2000s and will impact our memory of the decade. I think it ended up looking pretty cool and it was a fun look back…
At the end of December I spent a few days working on a new timeline template for washingtonpost.com. I created a new template that improved upon the navigation of our old timeline and allowed more flexibility in text and photo sizing, as well as automatic point placement and the use of points in time and ranges of time.
We’ve already used the template for several timelines, including the Cerrato timeline above, a look at women in political history, surge strategy timeline, and a look at Virginia inauguration history.
Nationwide County Map
After many months talking about how we wanted to produce a nationwide county map, we finally had a project come up that called for one with a quick turnaroud — one and a half days! With a great base map by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, I created this United States county map that shows unemployment from 2007-2009. This is an early version, so there’s a lot of improvements to make, but I think it’s a solid start, and I’m happy we turned it around as fast as we did. I used classes I created for the helicopters state map and the Virginia governor’s race map to make the build much easier.
D.C.’s unemployment rate was 12.1% in Oct. 2009 — really high. Macon County, where Franklin is, had an unemployment rate of 10.3%. We’ll keep adding to this map as time goes on, and I think it’ll be really interesting to see what happens with jobs and the economy over time.
Virginia Election Coverage
I worked on two graphics for the recent election in Virginia — a map that shows the results of the 2009 governor’s race and election results back to ’97, and a delegates meter showing the balance of power in the VA House of Delegates.
The governor map showed live results throughout the night, and at the end of the night historical results showed up as well, so that users could look at how voting patterns have shifted since previous elections. I think this was really interesting given the speculation about how the 2008 presidential election might impact this year’s race in Virginia.
The delegates meter was a quick piece, I just used some circle drawing math in AS3 to create 100 segments in a half-circle, and fill them in as the results came in. When you roll over the segments, you see current results for that district.
I made small versions of these graphics to go on our local homepage on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. They were simplified versions that linked out to the full graphics. I think that was a smart way to push traffic to our graphics on election night, while giving casual viewers a current tally of results.
Interactive Map of Virginia: A State of Change
This graphic looks at demographic changes in Virginia for the past 10 years. You can select a category to see demographics on the map, and roll over each county for details. This map reuses functionality I built out for the campaign finance map earlier this year. We’ll get a lot of use out of this map of Virginia in the future.
Map of DC AIDS Providers for Wasting Away series
This morning a project went up that I’ve been working on for a while. Debbie Cenziper investigated this really interesting piece on funding for AIDS providers in D.C.
“In a city ravaged by the highest rate of AIDS cases in the nation, the D.C. Health Department paid millions to nonprofit groups that delivered substandard services or failed to account for any work at all, even as sick people searched for care or died waiting.” - Staggering need, striking neglect
Whitney Shefte also did this beautiful documentary piece on AIDS in DC, which is really touching and a great overview of what’s happening in the city. For the package, I designed the splash page, the chapterized video player for Whitney’s documentary, and a map of providers in the district.
Mary Kate Cannistra located the agencies and provided me with a base map, and I built this piece that allows sorting through a slider mechanism and with radio button components. You can isolate agencies based on amount of funding, year of award or type of funding. It allows you to get more information by rolling over agencies or by selecting from a dropdown list, which is updated whenever you change the filters. We’ve also highlighted six providers, for which we’ve added extra information (photo and paragraph description).
The slider is reusable, you just initialize it with the two amounts at either end and the data that needs to update. I think we’ll have a lot of use for that functionality moving forward.
The Politics of the Prize
I created this graphic about controversial winners in Nobel Peace Prize history based off of some of the development work I’d done for the helicopters project. The timeline and slideshow componenets are very similar, I just switched the look of the slideshow portion and made the timeline interact with the slideshow.
Reusing the classes I’d created saved a lot of time — it only took a few hours to create this piece. With the improvements we could have a 15-minute turnaround on future projects.