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
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.
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: 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 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
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.
Yesterday we launched a multimedia narrative on the Battle of Wanat, one of the deadliest battles that have taken place in Afghanistan since the war began. I designed and developed this timeline in collaboration with Greg Jaffe, Liz Heron, Ben de la Cruz, Laris Karklis and several others.
It combines video, audio, maps, documents and photography to tell the story of what took place on July 13, 2008, when Taliban fighters launched a major assault on a small U.S. Army outpost in Afghanistan, killing nine soldiers and wounding 27. It chronicles the battle from the perspective of a lieutenant killed in the fight, Jonathan Brostrom, and his father, who has been seeking answers to what went wrong.
This graphic was published today, accompanying a story by James Grimaldi about how the Redskins are selling their tickets to brokers. The graphic explores lawsuits filed by the Redskins since 2005 and tickets sold to one broker in 2008. It also shows which tickets they filed lawsuits over and then resold to the broker. The lawsuits are sortable by amount and status, and the tickets are sortable by game.
I worked with Sarah Sampsel to create this interactive timeline of Ted Kennedy’s life, which has been used with coverage of his death and funeral this past week.
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.
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.
I was just poking around my old blog posts and realized that this blog is about to turn five years old on June 7. In honor of that milestone, I plan to completely redesign the blog and add some features. I’m also going to be posting some of my more recent work in the next few days/weeks.
I realize my last post was more than a year and a half ago, and a lot has happened in the interim. About a year ago, I started working at washingtonpost.com. I’ve been working on some really interesting projects, focusing primarily on creating interactive graphics, special report pages, and multimedia presentations.
Here are a some examples of multimedia projects I’ve worked on since starting at the Post:
Seeds of Peace: I did this project last July, but I was really happy with the way it turned out. Ben de la Cruz did a wonderful job on these three video stories and a Q&A video, so I had amazing art to work with for the splash page of this piece. A really incredible story of what’s going on in Uganda as civil war continues and people are displaced.
Egypt Panoramas: Post multimedia journalist Alexandra Garcia shot these beautiful panoramas of Egypt on a recent trip. I created this interface, with the pano moving behind the map of Egypt, which also acts as a menu. This project was built totally through XML, so it was really easy to reuse, as we did for the Venice Biennale.
Failing the Chesapeake: This small interactive piece acts as an anchor on the index page of the series. It features a then and now photo piece, a timeline, and several charts showing declining health of the Chesapeake. I also created an interactive panorama from a panorama Whitney Shefte shot of a skipjack, a type of boat used in the Chesapeake.
In the Moment: I did this splash design and set up the video players for this awesome piece the Washingon Post video team did on Barack Obama’s inauguration in January.
Israel Strikes Gaza Strip: During conflict in the Gaza Strip last December, I worked with Sarah Sampsel to create this XML-driven map of Israel that shows attack sites and gives a synopsis of the events as they occurred. We updated this throughout the conflict.
washingtonpost.com
Blood on the Mountain: Also, last summer I worked on this timeline about a murder on the Appalachian Trail. I thought it turned out to be interesting and I like the way the map is incorporated into the timeline. Plus, it’s a fascinating story, which never hurts 🙂
washingtonpost.com
And, to top it all off, my very first project at I worked on at the Post: Explore Nationals Park. This project incorporated video, panoramic images and a stadium rendering that we got from the firm that worked on the stadium, HOK Sport. I designed it and put together the dynamic version of some of the graphics, and Nelson Hsu put it all together. It was a great experience to work on something like this when I first arrived and Nelson was a great person to learn from.
washingtonpost.com
I also plan to (finally) post some pictures from India and some stories about the trip.
![[Redskins graphic]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1NI9wgirUFw/Sp83a72OmZI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/gwKjRo2pvaM/s400/Picture+7.png)
![[Scene In]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1NI9wgirUFw/Sp86PuFr9MI/AAAAAAAAAGY/vcjW3tiNkTY/s400/Picture+1.png)
![[In the Moment]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1NI9wgirUFw/Spp6yKwuoFI/AAAAAAAAAE0/1fE5fVHmbWw/s400/in-the-moment.jpg)
