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

ohio river ramble

On Tuesday evening, we launched the Ohio River Ramble on washingtonpost.com. Post.com political blogger Chris Cillizza, Post political reporter Jim VandeHei and Post.com videographer Chet Rhodes are on a nine-day road trip through nine congressional districts along the Ohio River Valley, visiting towns and cities in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia to get a feel for the prevailing political winds in those areas. They're sending back dispatches from their trip in the form of updates to Cillizza's blog, The Fix, video features and longer-form articles in the next day's Washington Post.

I've been responsible for the overall design of the package, including the Flash-based trip map (controlled via an XML file, with an inline video player) and all the promotional graphics, such as the writer sigs on blog posts.

In addition to being an interesting paper / Web site collaboration in terms of content, this project also has proven to be an interesting design collaboration: The paper's NewsArt department was able to get me an early version of the map nearly a week before it was due to run in print. After seeing my design for the Web site, artists at the paper pitched the idea of using a similar postcard-style treatment of the map in print.