Category: Portfolio

Published in The Washington Post, January 2016

When Snowzilla was looming, I started to wonder whether it was going to be as big as Snowmageddon — the craziest stormstorm I’d experienced in my life. I thought there was a comparison graphic to be done there and as the team was hustling on several other snow pieces (like this, this and this), I decided I would do it. I started it at about 4:30 p.m. and it was up early the following morning.

A few months earlier, I had had the crazy idea to use the browser window as a “water tank” to show how drought was affecting California’s reservoirs — Katie Park took that rough concept and ran with it, creating this great graphic that won a silver medal at SND Digital. With the snow coming, I started thinking about how I could compare the predicted snowfall for the upcoming storm with totals from history using the same concept — filling the browser window with the snow.

I figured out how Snowzilla compared, repurposed some of the code Katie wrote for the water piece, learned how to use CSS animations to make snow fall in the background, drew a silly snowman to give scale to the depth of the snow and put this simple piece out into the world.

If we do something like this again in the future, I’d love to make this run off live data. We could pull in the snowfall totals as they accumulate and animate the “snowflakes” and snow drifts in the graphic so they reflect the storm as it happens.

Role: Design, illustration, development, reporting

Published in The Washington Post, January 2016

Samuel Granados pitched a trip to Lesbos to tell the story of the migrant crisis in a visual way. I thought it was a great idea, we got the room excited about it and Samuel and Zoeann Murphy went to the island and reported this amazing story. When they returned, we had a ton of material to work with and had to spend quite a bit of time crafting the narrative and story structure.

After a lot of whiteboarding and brainstorming with the team, which also included Emily Chow and Kevin Schaul, I suggested doing a “tap essay,” inspired by Robin Sloan’s project Fish. We’d keep the number of slides succinct and we’d also offer readers the chance to go down different offshoots, but always come back to a central narrative. This was my first sketch of the “offshoot” concept (on the far right of the board):

We decided to pursue that concept and I created a prototype in Keynote, based on Samuel and Zoeann’s notes, visuals, and early narrative constructs, that demonstrated the functionality of the tap essay and the offshoots:

That very first UI prototype was taken from concept to reality through some truly impressive, smart and endlessly creative work by Samuel, Kevin, Zoeann and Emily, and with some important help from Griff Witte, our correspondent in the area.

We really wanted the experience to feel simple, elegant and powerful. We didn’t want extraneous UI to interfere with the user’s natural behavior as they moved through the story. We had a fantastic completion rate on the project and we found that more than half of people opted in to the offshoots.

This story was an amazing collaborative effort driven by visual reporting. I love how it works beautifully, but differently, on desktop and mobile devices — mostly due to some really smart engineering by Kevin!

The title “The Waypoint” was one of my contributions. I love headlines!

Role: Editing, storyboarding, prototyping, some design and light development.

Awards: National Press Foundation Best Use of Technology in Journalism Award; Pictures of the Year International 1st place in Online Feature Story Editing; White House News Photographers Association Honorable Mention for Best Multimedia Package

Published in The Washington Post, Fall 2015

These debate deconstructions have been a fantastic collaboration led by Samuel Granados and have included a bunch of different folks in the team. I love their simplicity, playfulness and visual approach. I’ve helped construct the narratives, design some of the visual elements, and write the text.

Role: Writing, editing, some design (not the example above, Kevin Uhrmacher designed that! But it’s my favorite graphic in the project — hilarious.)

Awards: Award of Excellence in the SND Digital competition

More debate deconstructions: 10 charts explain how Rubio emerged, Bush devolved in third GOP debate, Deconstructing the #demdebate: Clinton, Sanders control conversation

Published in The Washington Post, Nov. 19, 2015

Role: Project management, graphics and design editing, light development

Awards: Silver medal in the SND Digital competition

This project, the result of many months of detailed data analysis and reporting, was the product of a wonderful collaboration between reporters, designers and developers. My team was responsible for the graphics, template design and full-stack development. I helped refine and edit the graphics and overall design, keep the project on schedule and stakeholders informed, and develop and style small front-end components.

Published in The Washington Post, June 26, 2015

Design Director Greg Manifold and I prototyped an experience for this story. We wanted to emphasize the exceptional photography and make the introduction highly visual, captivating and emotional. We hoped that would hook readers into a deep reading experience. I suggested contextual mapping: when a place is mentioned in the narrative, it is highlighted in the accompanying map. Emily Yount, Emily Chow, Seth Blanchard and Lazaro Gamio took the rough prototype we built and transformed it into this wonderful project.

Role: Design, concept, prototyping

Awards: Award of Excellence in the SND Digital competition

More story design/editing: The N-word, Prophets of Oak Ridge, Cycling’s road forward