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

recent projects

There are a number of things I’ve been working on lately that I’ve neglected to mention here:

Campaign Tracker

My most recent project was the design for Campaign Tracker, which lets users follow candidates along the campaign trail and see events in their states. Adrian Holovaty, who did the web development for this, has a more detailed write-up of the features Campaign Tracker offers.

Credits: Development by Adrian Holovaty and Derek Willis. Design by Alyson Hurt. Editing and data collection by Sarah Lovenheim, Vanessa Mizell, Ed O’Keefe and Nikki Schwab.

Campaign Finance

A couple weeks ago, we launched a database of candidates’ first quarter 2007 financial disclosures, which allows users to see how much money each campaign has and where they’re getting it from. For me, this was a bit of a design challenge: How do you make something that’s so text / number-intensive easy to browse? My solution was varied point sizes and bolding, depending on the relative importance of that bit of information, and lightly shaded backgrounds to highlight key blocks of information. These ideas carried over into my design for Campaign Tracker as well.

Credits: Development by Derek Willis and Adrian Holovaty; Design by Alyson Hurt.

We’ve also integrated all this new information into our presidential candidate profile pages, so that, say, Barack Obama’s page displays not only his bio and recent Post coverage, but his upcoming events and financial status as well.

Congressional Cemetery

Completely unrelated to politics, there’s a multimedia project I did back in December that I keep forgetting to mention. Congressional Cemetery is a historic, often-overlooked cemetery located south of Capitol Hill that serves as the final resting place for such notables as John Philip Sousa, J. Edgar Hoover and Mathew Brady. This feature offers an interactive tour of the cemetery, with photos and panoramas from various parts of the grounds. This was an especially fun project for me because I got to accompany the photographer and really get a feel for the place, rather than assemble something from the pieces given to me after the fact.

Credits: Panoramic composites and photography by Whitney Shefte; Reporting by Ryan Holeywell; Design and Flash programming by Alyson Hurt