Tag Archives: Flash

Moving away from Flash: A look at JavaScript drawing libraries

Programming June 2, 2011 katdowns Leave a comment

Excerpts from a new post for WP’s @innovations blog: [Go to the blog to read the whole thing] When Apple announced early last year that it would not support Flash on the iPhone and iPad, a passionate conversation erupted in the world of web development: Was Flash dead? If not, how would it survive? When should it be used? News developers asked these questions as well, and, at least in our newsroom, the conversation inspired some thinking about how to approach interactive development. Over the…

D.C.’s rock scene: 9:30 club turns 30

Multimedia April 16, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

I spent the last few days working on this piece about the 30th anniversary of the opening of the 9:30 club, one of the best venues in D.C. (and a lot of people would say the whole country). Alex Garcia shot some great concert video and interviewed some key people, and Josh du Lac wrote the magazine story. I pulled it all together in this multimedia slideshow, which has several different text layouts and video in varying sizes. The content of this is the coolest…

New project: Graphic explains the search for a serial rapist

Information Graphics, Multimedia March 22, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

I worked on this graphic with reporters Josh White and Maria Glod, who collected an incredible amount of information on the East Coast Rapist, a man who has been on the loose for 13 years and is a suspect in 17 cases. For this important story, I organized the data that Josh and Maria collected into an easy-to-use interface that had the details of each case, including a small photo gallery, a google map, a quote and all the case information. I built an interface…

Videos from India Trip

Multimedia February 28, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

A full year after Whitney and my trip to India, we finally finished up the piece we were working on for it: India in Motion, which was published on The Washington Post’s website. Whitney did over 20 short videos reflecting the sights and sounds of the country. There are videos from almost all the places we visited, chief among them Mumbai, Udaipur and Rishikesh. I designed the piece and built the player, which had some similarities to Scene In in that it was a series…

Virginia Election Coverage

Information Graphics, Work November 24, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

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…

Interactive Map of Virginia: A State of Change

Maps, Work October 27, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

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.

The Politics of the Prize

Design and infographics, Work October 10, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

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.

The Battle of Wanat

Multimedia, Work October 5, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

Yesterday we launched a multimedia narrative on the Battle of Wanat, one of the deadliest battles that have taken place in Afghanistan since the war began. I designed and developed this timeline in collaboration with Greg Jaffe, Liz Heron, Ben de la Cruz, Laris Karklis and several others. It combines video, audio, maps, documents and photography to tell the story of what took place on July 13, 2008, when Taliban fighters launched a major assault on a small U.S. Army outpost in Afghanistan, killing nine…

New Series: Fatal Flights

Information Graphics August 24, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

Last Friday The Washington Post published an investigative series, “Fatal Flights,” on medical helicopters in the U.S. I worked on three graphics for the piece: two for the first day and one that ran Sunday. The first piece, Fatal Crashes Since 1980, combined a timeline, trend data and crash and victim information for all fatal crashes since 1980. We also put together this timeline of the 2008 Maryland crash that uses audio and maps to piece together what happened during the search for Trooper 2.I…

Recent Design and Development Work

Information Graphics, Work August 24, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

I said I was going to publish some of my recent work, so here goes. All of this stuff has been done in the past several months and has been published on washingtonpost.com. I worked on this interactive graphic about North Korean prison camps last month. It explores the five major camps and goes into detail about camp 15. Laris Karklis did the maps, Blaine Harden wrote the text, and I did the design and build. In April, I worked with Amanda Zamora and Alexandra…