With Tuesday’s apportionment announcement, we decided to create an interactive map that would look at reapportionment over time. Census also created a map like that here.
Gene Thorp created a cartogram with the data that appeared on page 1 of the newspaper — you can check that out here.
Check out my first motion graphics piece, created for part two of Top Secret America, an investigation from The Washington Post.
I worked with Dana Priest to write the script and I recorded the voiceover and did all the animation in After Effects. I created the graphic with maps made by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso. I’ll write more later about the concept and execution. Let me know what you think!
I worked on these games last Monday for publication with Tuesday’s health section. Reporter Leslie Tamura collected a whole bunch of tests that indicate how you’re aging compared to peers. We decided to take some of those tests and replicate them for our online readers. We decided on word recall, face recognition and response time. Simple, but fun. Check them out!
On Nov. 2, midterm election day, we put up these maps that tracked the results as they came in. For Senate and Governors we had state and county-level data, and we had House districts as well. This suite of maps was published in The Washington Post, as well as on Yahoo! News and the Telegraph (UK). The maps have balance of power charting and tabular results as well as zooming and deep linking features. Read more about how we built the maps »
This past Sunday “Coming home a different person” launched, a project I worked on with Whitney Shefte and Alberto Cuadra, alongside reporter Chris Davenport. It features an overview video that covers the increases in traumatic brain injury cases and what doctors are doing to treat it, as well as five case studies of three soldiers and two Marines, and a graphic that explains the science of brain injury.
I initially heard about the story Chris Davenport was working on and thought, wow, this is an amazing multimedia opportunity. I went to Whitney and asked her if she’d like to work on it with me. We huddled with Chris and storyboarded out a basic flow for the intro video and the entire piece — how it would be structured and how we should integrate the graphics with the videos. Read more about how we developed this multimedia piece »
This investigation, which launched September 30, focused on Alaska Native Corporations and their explosive growth during the last decade. I combined photos, graphics and video in a multimedia slideshow. The intention was to build a relationship between the corporations and the shareholders they represent. Alaska natives are some of the nation’s poorest people, and some of the corporations that were supposed to be helping them make their way have instead been funneling money back to contractors in Washington.
In preparation for the September 14 primaries, I designed this widget for the Politics front. It features house, senate and governors races that auto advance, as well as races to watch, and allows you to see all the races in one convenient spot. It was actually built out by a contractor, Zvi Band of SkeevisArts. We used it on the politics front as the live results came in, and will be able to re-purpose it for future elections.
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 »