Sarah Sampsel

washingtonpost.com

Voices of The Recession is an occasional series of video stories about the economic downturn’s impact on people in the D.C. region. The videos by Pierre Kattar show an interesting variety of stories, conveying both positive and negative effects of the recession in a very human, personal way.

I designed and developed the interface to try and showcase the voices and faces of the people profiled. So much of what was reported about the recession and economic downturn was focused on why and how it happened and less on how it was actually affecting people in our own neighborhood. For that reason, I felt it even more important to preface these stories in a way that focused on the human aspect of the situations illustrated, even before watching the video.

The design concept is simple. Using stills, I grouped featured people from each video together and applied titling and blurb information to those groups on a rollover. Each group is toned to black and white and sits upon a vibrant color photo of D.C.

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The Global Food Crisis examines causes and effects of the world’s most extreme food shortage in decades. From poor harvests to problems with global trade, this series explores the issues of rising food prices and demand worldwide. The package launched at the beginning of a five-day series and continues to update with story developments and multimedia.

This was one of the first larger-scale projects I worked on for the site. It gave me the chance to use the full width of the page for design and layout. And because I had so much amazing photography to choose from, I chose to lead the top table with a large image, a generous area for a main headline and blurb, and space for detailing the full series.

I knew most of the photography that would populate the page would be powerful or contain lots of detail or color, so the design was built to accommodate that strong imagery. I wanted to use the greens and yellows from the rice paddy photo I used along the masthead throughout the design, so I chose to lay out the page in a fairly simple way with a muted beige/green background tone. I also used a yellowish/green color style for kickers, keeping the design unified from top to bottom.

This is a great example of creating a design to support the content and to let the photography and text shine.

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Israel Strikes Gaza Strip is a package created for washingtonpost.com’s World section documenting attacks in and around the Gaza strip that began late December of 2008. The landing page acts as an index of articles and information and leads with an interactive map detailing recent attacks and air strikes. The page also features comprehensive information about the history of violence in the area.

The nature of the story posed a design challenge. As an ongoing story, it had to be created in a way to enable quick and easy updates from a staff of producers. It was also the type of story that required immediate action for reporting online, so it had to get published out fast. Therefore, the content is all populated dynamically by XML, which streamlines the process.

Here are similar presentations from other sites:

• The Guardian: The Israeli Attacks on Gaza
• NyTimes.com: Conflict in Gaza Interactive
• BBC News: Gaza Conflict Map

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Washingtonpost.com today debuted a redesigned site header, dropping the branded ‘washingtonpost.com’ logo for the traditional scripted logo seen on the masthead of The Washington Post print edition.

This is good. The visual change unifies the brand across all the major publishing mediums and reinforces the high standards of accountability journalism from the long-trusted Washington Post brand.