Tag Archives: The Washington Post

Say What? Interactive transcript player tool is a new way to tell speech stories

Projects August 31, 2012 katdowns Leave a comment

Yesterday, we launched a new project: an interactive transcript player that matches up the words of the speech, Post analysis, and reaction from Twitter. I have been wanting to do a Twitter project for a while, and this time all the pieces fit together. After I pitched the idea, Cory Haik coordinated a partnership with VoterTide, a great company in Omaha that does aggregation and analysis of Twitter trends specifically around politics, that made the Twitter analysis segment possible. I designed the piece, and we…

How does your income compare?

Information Graphics September 28, 2011 katdowns Leave a comment

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!

Royal rumors (and some graphics fun)

Multimedia September 18, 2011 katdowns Leave a comment

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…

Analyzing the U.S. tax code, break by break, and other recent charts

Information Graphics September 18, 2011 katdowns Leave a comment

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…

Mapping the news: Libya and Japan

Information Graphics, Maps, Multimedia March 21, 2011 katdowns Leave a comment

The past several weeks have been full of foreign news, and we have been producing lots of graphics to explain what’s happening. I have worked on these two graphics, one about the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan, and one that explains what is going on in Libya. For a full explanation of the process of creating the Japan graphic, visit the new Innovations blog at the WP (excerpted below): Friday morning, as news of the earthquake in Japan spread, we started pulling together an…

Census apportionment over time

Information Graphics December 23, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

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.

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!

Creating Live Election Results Maps

Maps November 13, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

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.

The Cost of War

Multimedia October 7, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

This past Sunday “Coming home a different person” launched, a project I worked on with Whitney Shefte and Alberto Cuadra, alongside reporter Chris Davenport. It features an overview video that covers the increases in traumatic brain injury cases and what doctors are doing to treat it, as well as five case studies of three soldiers and two Marines, and a graphic that explains the science of brain injury. I initially heard about the story Chris Davenport was working on and thought, wow, this is an…

Alternative story formats: Investigation into Alaska native corporations

Multimedia October 4, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

This investigation, which launched September 30, focused on Alaska Native Corporations and their explosive growth during the last decade. I combined photos, graphics and video in a multimedia slideshow. The intention was to build a relationship between the corporations and the shareholders they represent. Alaska natives are some of the nation’s poorest people, and some of the corporations that were supposed to be helping them make their way have instead been funneling money back to contractors in Washington.

Liquor sales and consumption

Information Graphics August 6, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

This piece on liquor sales and consumption in Virginia features the 10 top-selling liquors in the state, as well as a tax breakdown and a map showing which areas are purchasing the most liquor. I think looking at the top sellers is interesting — to see that Aristocrat sold more than Jose Cuervo or Captain Morgan. It was a quick-turnaround, fun piece that paints a picture of how Virginia drinks.

Path of a predator

Information Graphics July 25, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

After a long week & weekend of wrapping up the Top Secret America project, we hit the ground running with a project that came out today about local teacher Kevin Ricks. A four-month Washington Post investigation of his career revealed a pattern of abuse that goes back to at least 1978 and has a trail of victims that spans the globe. Reporters Josh White, Jennifer Buske, Michael Chandler and Blaine Harden worked on the story, which was just a great piece of reporting. Go read…

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…

A look at the life of an alleged spy

Multimedia July 6, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

Last week, after the news broke that one of the 10 alleged Russian spies arrested by the FBI most recently lived and worked in Arlington, Va., Ben de la Cruz came up with the idea to do some panos of the scenes where the alleged spy lived his life. We talked through how we’d like to present it and how the story would flow through the audio and panos. Then Ben worked with Alex Garcia to shoot and stitch the panos and he wrote and…

Metro Fare Calculator

Information Graphics June 27, 2010 katdowns Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I put together this little fare calculator that helps people figure out how much their rates are going up since the new fares have passed. It’s a really simple but useful tool.