This week we launched two new interactives embedded in Ezra Klein’s blog, Wonkbook. Ezra and Dylan Matthews put together the information, Todd Lindeman designed it and Andrew Metcalf built it. I helped with styles, etc. It’s a fun experience, and I love that it’s built for the blog. Check them out! Romney version here: Obama version here:
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…
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…
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…
With Tuesday’s apportionment announcement, we decided to create an interactive map that would look at reapportionment over time. Census also created a map like that here. Gene Thorp created a cartogram with the data that appeared on page 1 of the newspaper — you can check that out here.
On Nov. 2, midterm election day, we put up these maps that tracked the results as they came in. For Senate and Governors we had state and county-level data, and we had House districts as well. This suite of maps was published in The Washington Post, as well as on Yahoo! News and the Telegraph (UK). The maps have balance of power charting and tabular results as well as zooming and deep linking features.
In preparation for the September 14 primaries, I designed this widget for the Politics front. It features house, senate and governors races that auto advance, as well as races to watch, and allows you to see all the races in one convenient spot. It was actually built out by a contractor, Zvi Band of SkeevisArts. We used it on the politics front as the live results came in, and will be able to re-purpose it for future elections.
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…
These three new race maps (house, senate, and governors) launched today with the new PostPolitics section of The Washington Post. I worked with Karen Yourish and Dan Keating, who are absolutely amazing data whizzes, to get the data together for the project, and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso gave me some great base maps to start with. We really wanted to give a complete picture of the 2010 races, so we have current race ratings (for house, we have state of the race), election history for each…
I re-purposed the unemployment map for this story about ultra-high billing rates at skilled nursing facilities in the U.S. It shows where facilities are billing ultra-high rates. The Washington Post found that nursing homes have flooded ‘ultra-high’ billing categories with patients, and the amount of waste and abuse could reach billions of dollars a year. Check out the graphic or read the story by Scott Higham and Dan Keating.
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…
1. I think the new Killers CD is good - Sam’s Town. The two tracks I like most are “Bones” and “When You Were Young” - interestingly… their singles. 2. Saw Babel. Heavy on emotion, light on depth and context. 3. Rumsfeld Resigns And a beautiful quote from Hayden‘s song “Don’t Get Down” - please listen to it. “Write a songAll your old ones don’t mean a thing if you don’t singAny new ones”
This’ll put a smile on your face: Adorable! I should’ve turned my ideas into reality when I was in college…now I’d be a millionaire, too. And, I could stay in school. Nerds Rule. Love for free speech in Britain.
The panda hugger: What a guy! Who would’ve thought Pandas were dangerous? And just as a little treat, my car got hit in the parking lot. Luckily, “Brian” left me a note: Hit your car. Scratched up your left rear bumper. Reeally really sorry. - Brian Adorable. Love the frowny face.
I heard on the radio this morning that you can actually choose the sex of your baby. Here’s an excerpt from WAMU’s Market Morning Report’s piece entitled “I’ll Have a Girl, Please”: JENNIFER MERRILL THOMPSON: “I really, really wanted a daughter, and I knew that technology was probably the only way it was going to happen for me. And we didn’t want to keep having boy after boy. I didn’t want to have a huge family, so we were willing to spend the money to…