Tag Archives: Information Graphics

Catching up on 2012

Multimedia, Work August 26, 2012 katdowns Leave a comment

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…

Putting graphics in motion

Motion Graphics December 21, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

Check out my first motion graphics piece, created for part two of Top Secret America, an investigation from The Washington Post. I worked with Dana Priest to write the script and I recorded the voiceover and did all the animation in After Effects. I created the graphic with maps made by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso. I’ll write more later about the concept and execution. Let me know what you think!

Top Secret connections

Information Graphics July 20, 2010 katdowns 3 Comments

After a full year of working on various aspects of the Top Secret America project, we have finally launched! Check out the full project at topsecretamerica.com. I worked on a whole bunch of aspects of this project and did a lot of brainstorming and storyboarding, but my primary focus was the interactive “network connections” graphic. In the beginning we wanted to create a graphic that illustrated the redundancy and size of Top Secret America and had a ton of data in it, while not being…

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…

Nationwide County Map

Maps, Work December 3, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

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…

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.

Map of DC AIDS Providers for Wasting Away series

Maps, Work October 18, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

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…

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 Graphic: Redskins Lawsuits, Tickets

Information Graphics, Work September 2, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

This graphic was published today, accompanying a story by James Grimaldi about how the Redskins are selling their tickets to brokers. The graphic explores lawsuits filed by the Redskins since 2005 and tickets sold to one broker in 2008. It also shows which tickets they filed lawsuits over and then resold to the broker. The lawsuits are sortable by amount and status, and the tickets are sortable by game.

Timeline: The Life of Edward M. Kennedy

Information Graphics, Work August 30, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

I worked with Sarah Sampsel to create this interactive timeline of Ted Kennedy’s life, which has been used with coverage of his death and funeral this past week.

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…

Five Years of Banter / What I’ve Been Working On

Design and infographics, Work May 21, 2009 katdowns Leave a comment

I was just poking around my old blog posts and realized that this blog is about to turn five years old on June 7. In honor of that milestone, I plan to completely redesign the blog and add some features. I’m also going to be posting some of my more recent work in the next few days/weeks. I realize my last post was more than a year and a half ago, and a lot has happened in the interim. About a year ago, I started…