This piece on liquor sales and consumption in Virginia features the 10 top-selling liquors in the state, as well as a tax breakdown and a map showing which areas are purchasing the most liquor. I think looking at the top sellers is interesting — to see that Aristocrat sold more than Jose Cuervo or Captain Morgan. It was a quick-turnaround, fun piece that paints a picture of how Virginia drinks.
After a long week & weekend of wrapping up the Top Secret America project, we hit the ground running with a project that came out today about local teacher Kevin Ricks. A four-month Washington Post investigation of his career revealed a pattern of abuse that goes back to at least 1978 and has a trail of victims that spans the globe. Reporters Josh White, Jennifer Buske, Michael Chandler and Blaine Harden worked on the story, which was just a great piece of reporting. Go read it!
The timeline tells the story through each place Ricks has been, including maps and a list of schools where he worked in each place. It also has audio clips from a hearing where a German student tried unsuccessfully to get a restraining order against Ricks, and myspace messages that Ricks wrote.
This graphic was done using jQuery and CSS. It uses the ColorBox jQuery plugin for the lightbox effect. The audio players are the only Flash pieces in the project — they’re standard across the site (I built them about a year ago). So check it out on your iPad 🙂
After a full year of working on various aspects of the Top Secret America project, we have finally launched! Check out the full project at topsecretamerica.com.
I worked on a whole bunch of aspects of this project and did a lot of brainstorming and storyboarding, but my primary focus was the interactive “network connections” graphic. In the beginning we wanted to create a graphic that illustrated the redundancy and size of Top Secret America and had a ton of data in it, while not being overwhelming. Read more »
Last week, after the news broke that one of the 10 alleged Russian spies arrested by the FBI most recently lived and worked in Arlington, Va., Ben de la Cruz came up with the idea to do some panos of the scenes where the alleged spy lived his life. We talked through how we’d like to present it and how the story would flow through the audio and panos. Then Ben worked with Alex Garcia to shoot and stitch the panos and he wrote and recorded the narration. I put together the piece in a slideshow format, with audio and a pano for each location on the map. It took about 6 hours of my time to put together. It’s a nice little piece that’s a window into the life of a spy — something we’re all very curious about.
A few weeks ago I put together this little fare calculator that helps people figure out how much their rates are going up since the new fares have passed. It’s a really simple but useful tool.
We published this graphic for Arbor Day, which was on April 30. It takes a look at all the trees that have been planted by the non-profit organization Casey Trees since 2003. They’ve planted thousands of trees in order to try to increase D.C.’s “urban canopy.” You can use this tool to see where they’ve planted trees in your neighborhood and what kind they are.
From a technical standpoint, this project was really interesting. It was executed in about two days, so it was a really quick turnaround, considering I haven’t done extensive development with the google maps api. Nathaniel and Gene worked up some cool custom tiles, and I designed and programmed a lot of it, and fit all the pieces together. Keep reading this post »
These three new race maps (house, senate, and governors) launched today with the new PostPolitics section of The Washington Post. I worked with Karen Yourish and Dan Keating, who are absolutely amazing data whizzes, to get the data together for the project, and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso gave me some great base maps to start with. We really wanted to give a complete picture of the 2010 races, so we have current race ratings (for house, we have state of the race), election history for each district or state, and demographic information that lets you see some cool patterns — like how states vote when they have a high percentage of seniors or high poverty rates. Keep reading this post »
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.
Akira Hakuta created these videos about the five finalists in The Washington Post’s Peeps Diorama contest, which has some really creative entries this year. Videos feature The Mad Hatter, Korean War memorial, the movie Up, and “Goodnight Peeps.” I created the player, which is almost exactly the same as the Scene In player. Noel Smart designed the logo treatment.
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.
