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 givingĀ  casual viewers a current tally of results.

VA Election: Local HP
VA Election: Local HP

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.

New Series: Fatal Flights

Last Friday The Washington Post published an investigative series, “Fatal Flights,” on medical helicopters in the U.S.

I worked on three graphics for the piece: two for the first day and one that ran Sunday. The first piece, Fatal Crashes Since 1980, combined a timeline, trend data and crash and victim information for all fatal crashes since 1980.


We also put together this timeline of the 2008 Maryland crash that uses audio and maps to piece together what happened during the search for Trooper 2.



I also created this simple state-by-state map that incorporates filters for different data points. The map shows how helicopters are concentrated throughout the states and how helicopter numbers relate to medicare population and trips.

Recent Design and Development Work

I said I was going to publish some of my recent work, so here goes. All of this stuff has been done in the past several months and has been published on washingtonpost.com.

I worked on this interactive graphic about North Korean prison camps last month. It explores the five major camps and goes into detail about camp 15. Laris Karklis did the maps, Blaine Harden wrote the text, and I did the design and build.

In April, I worked with Amanda Zamora and Alexandra Garcia on this panoramic timeline of the scene of the shooting of DeOnte Rawlings. It uses three panoramic images, a map, and multiple hot spots to lead the reader through the sequence of events that led to Rawlings’ death. I used the same technology (Flash Panorama Player’s hotspots plugin) for this as I did for the Skipjack pano piece I posted below, but I think this is a much more sophisticated use of hotspot technology.

In April we also launched the D.C. budget game, which people can use to learn more about the city budget and what programs would stay or go with varying levels of funding. Users can save their budgets and compare their choices with other users.

For Barack Obama’s first 100 days, I created this sortable photo gallery that lets readers see exactly what he was doing. Load time is pretty slow, so future iterations will be much leaner.


Scene In: This player for a new series on fashion in D.C. by Alexandra Garcia utilizes the new AS3 video player Jesse Foltz created and features a logo illustration by Noel Smart. I designed the series player and built out the functionality. A new episode comes out every other Thursday.

[Scene In]