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D.C.’s rock scene: 9:30 club turns 30

A multimedia history of the 9:30 club
A multimedia history of the 9:30 club

I spent the last few days working on this piece about the 30th anniversary of the opening of the 9:30 club, one of the best venues in D.C. (and a lot of people would say the whole country). Alex Garcia shot some great concert video and interviewed some key people, and Josh du Lac wrote the magazine story. I pulled it all together in this multimedia slideshow, which has several different text layouts and video in varying sizes. The content of this is the coolest part — there are some great stories in there about the old club: how there were so many rats they had something called the “rat highway,” how Will Smith (The Fresh Prince) showed up and just left without playing the show because he was so disgusted at how the place looked and smelled, and a whole bunch more. There are also some great photos from the ’80s and ’90s. I pulled the illustrations from the magazine layout, which you can see here.

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New county map: Ultra-high Medicare Billing Rates

Billing Medicare at the highest rates

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.

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New project: Graphic explains the search for a serial rapist

Rapist's trail spans four states, 13 years

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 that drew connections between the cases and allowed people to sort the cases by date, location, existence of dna samples, and the weapon used. It also featured a map interface, a gallery and a video. Keep reading this post »

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Videos from India Trip

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.

India in Motion

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 »

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Recent projects: Remembering the decade and new timeline template

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)
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.

Cerrato Timeline (washingtonpost.com)
Cerrato Timeline (washingtonpost.com)

We’ve already used the template for several timelines, including the Cerrato timeline above, a look at women in political history, surge strategy timeline, and a look at Virginia inauguration history.

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Nationwide County Map

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
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.

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Virginia Election Coverage

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: Results Map
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 Data
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
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.

VA Election: Local HP
VA Election: Local HP
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Map of DC AIDS Providers for Wasting Away series

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 AIDS Providers in D.C.
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.