Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

faces of the fallen

“Faces of the Fallen,” an ongoing feature at washingtonpost.com which lists all the soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, relaunched yesterday afternoon. It’s a sobering look at some of the war’s human toll — 2,574 U.S. soldiers killed to date — and allows people to go beyond the statistics learn a little more about the soldiers who have died.

Producing “Faces” for the past several years has been a team effort, with design by Nelson Hsu and research done by countless people at the Post and post.com. This latest incarnation, which features maps, charts and more ways to explore the information, was developed by Adrian Holovaty. I worked with Adrian and Nelson to translate Nelson’s design into a series of HTML/CSS templates that Adrian could use to output the data in a variety of forms.

When “Faces” originally launched a few years ago, it was the online version of a special feature that ran in the newspaper. It was so well-received that it became an ongoing fixture of the site. But since the original graphic had been built as a one-time thing, every update had to be done by hand in Flash. The Flash application was eventually re-engineered to work with XML files output by a database. Yesterday, the feature was re-launched as a HTML/databased site.