This project was a video snapshot of a trip to India I went on last year. It features over 20 short videos in a player I built and designed. It autoplays from one video to the next, and allows users to jump forward and back using thumbnails, a map, or a dropdown list. It is a variation on the series player I created for Scene In, a fashion series on Washington, D.C.
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 player and I used some of the same code, but look and feel wise, it is pretty different. Keep reading this post »
This project focuses on five major prison camps in North Korea, which are becoming more and more visible through the availability of satellite imagery. We highlight the camps and give a close-up view of camp 15, one of the biggest camps. I did research for this graphic, and designed and built the interface, which features some really cool maps by Laris Karklis, a Post cartographer.
It’s been a little while since I updated the blog, so here are a couple of projects from the past month and a half that I think are pretty cool.
The first is a look back at the aughts that I worked on with Joel Achenbach, which was great because I’ve always admired his work and thought he was hilarious. I designed and build a fairly simple panel graphic that has collages of some major things that happened in the 2000s and will impact our memory of the decade. I think it ended up looking pretty cool and it was a fun look back…
Remembering the decade (washingtonpost.com)
At the end of December I spent a few days working on a new timeline template for washingtonpost.com. I created a new template that improved upon the navigation of our old timeline and allowed more flexibility in text and photo sizing, as well as automatic point placement and the use of points in time and ranges of time.
I did the photography and audio for this piece about a mud-racing mechanic on the eastern shore of North Carolina. I spent several days with Critter at his shop, at home and out and about in Newport. He’s an incredible character and he gave me an open look into his life. To watch, go here and click “Critter.”
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 as we did. I used classes I created for the helicopters state map and the Virginia governor’s race map to make the build much easier.
Unemployment by county
D.C.’s unemployment rate was 12.1% in Oct. 2009 — really high. Macon County, where Franklin is, had an unemployment rate of 10.3%. We’ll keep adding to this map as time goes on, and I think it’ll be really interesting to see what happens with jobs and the economy over time.
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.
VA Election: Live Results
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 interesting given the speculation about how the 2008 presidential election might impact this year’s race in Virginia.
VA Elections: Historical Voting Shifts
The delegates meter was a quick piece, I just used some circle drawing math in AS3 to create 100 segments in a half-circle, and fill them in as the results came in. When you roll over the segments, you see current results for that district.
VA Elections; Delegates Meter
I made small versions of these graphics to go on our local homepage on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. They were simplified versions that linked out to the full graphics. I think that was a smart way to push traffic to our graphics on election night, while giving casual viewers a current tally of results.
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.
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
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.
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.
![[Map image]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1NI9wgirUFw/SucwgpHmSpI/AAAAAAAAAIs/lQwnCpmThN4/s400/Picture+1.png)
![[Politics of the Prize]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1NI9wgirUFw/StC6eqXdCwI/AAAAAAAAAIY/uUAABKBskZc/s400/Picture+1.png)