Kat Downs / Blog / Interactive graphics, multimedia projects, and visual journalism

October 27, 2009 on Maps, Work

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.

A state of change

Posted by Kat Downs on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Tags: demographics, Flash, Information Graphics, local, Maps, The Washington Post

October 19, 2009 on Photography and multimedia

A few weeks ago I shot my first real set of engagement photos for some friends of mine, Caitlin and Alex, who are getting married in November. We decided to shoot around the Capitol and Supreme Court (2nd St. NE) first and try to get some good shots with some classic DC backgrounds. It rained the whole day but started to clear up right before we went out — about 5:30. We ended up with some really beautiful evening light. They looked great and we had a lot of fun. I mostly used a 50mm lens with an aperture of 1.8 and an off-camera flash when it was needed. It was a really positive experience and I’m looking forward to doing more of it in the future.

Posted by Kat Downs on Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Tags: dc, engagements

October 18, 2009 on Maps, Work

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.

Map of D.C. Aids Providers

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.

Posted by Kat Downs on Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Tags: Information Graphics, investigations, Maps, Mary Kate Cannistra, The Washington Post, Videos, Whitney Shefte

October 10, 2009 on Design and infographics, Work

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.

Timeline: Politics of the Prize

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.

Posted by Kat Downs on Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Tags: Flash, Information Graphics, Karen Yourish, The Washington Post, timeline

October 5, 2009 on Multimedia, Work

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 soldiers and wounding 27. It chronicles the battle from the perspective of a lieutenant killed in the fight, Jonathan Brostrom, and his father, who has been seeking answers to what went wrong.

Posted by Kat Downs on Monday, October 5, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Tags: audio, Ben de la Cruz, Flash, Information Graphics, Laris Karklis, Multimedia, The Washington Post, Videos, Work