Sarah Sampsel

washingtonpost.com

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.

washingtonpost.com

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

washingtonpost.com

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.

washingtonpost.com

‘Choose Your Candidate‘ was an interactive quiz aimed at helping users select their favorite 2008 presidential candidate based on 10 marquee campaign issues. It allowed users to read through specific answers to questions regarding selected issues, then choose the candidate they agree with most - without knowing who said what.

This interface is unique because each issue was based on answers directly from the candidates - a fact that gave users unfiltered information about each key issue.

I designed the UI and flow throughout the quiz and assisted on development in Flash.

This was a challenging project simply because of all the options. Users could select a Democratic or Republican track, then proceed with choosing the answer that best fit their beliefs on each issue. And because some people felt more strongly about certain issues than others, this interface was designed to weigh the ones of greater importance to that specific user.

Here are similar quizzes from other sites:

• ABC News - Match-o-Matic
• USA Today - Candidate Match Game