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

calm after the storm

Was the election really a whole week ago?

The three weeks leading up to the election — and the week before in particular — my work life revolved around the elections, and my personal mantra was a countdown to Election Day.

“One more week. One more week…”

“Five more days. Five more days…”

“Three more days. Three more days…”

“One more day. One more day…”

“Showtime.”

I started at post.com a week before the 2004 presidential election, choosing that particular timing because there was no way I wanted to miss out on being in the newsroom on election night — particularly not a presidential election night. My contribution was limited to taking screenshots of our site and keeping an eye on what our competitors were doing, but it was still so exciting to be in the middle of everything.

Two years later, I served as lead designer for much of our 2006 elections coverage, from election results pages to the Ohio River Ramble and the election night homepage and a Flash graph showing the latest control of Congress numbers. It was a big project — and just a little intimidating, given the relative high profile of political coverage on our site — but it was a huge thrill to be a part of it.

I couldn’t have asked for a smoother evening. From information architecture to community-building to systems infrastructure, a ton of work across multiple departments had gone into preparing for the night, and, minor hiccups aside, things went off without a hitch. Britney aside, there wasn’t even much in the way of competing big news that night. It was fantastic.

Even though election night has passed, I’m learning that the campaigns are never really over. The name of the game these past few days has been post-election “what does it all mean?” analysis. Soon enough, we’ll be hearing about the 2008 presidential election — in fact, it’s already begun. Whew.