Print versus online
Increasingly we need to make web versions of graphics that were originally prepared for print publication, and the expectation for the future is that we will create content for the web first and for print second, if at all.
Most of my career has been in print graphics, since that is where newspapers have been most profitable (and still are.) In the past, if there was going to be a web version of a graphic, someone in another department would take my work and convert it. The web and print operations were mostly separate. That's changing now for all but the largest papers. But the reality of having art departments, whose staff in most cases have already been pared back, take on the extra work of making two versions of graphics forces compromises in scope and ambition. So our interactive versions tend to be simple and quick, mostly the same as the print version but with rollover or click buttons to call out some additional information or images.
Fortress Rosecrans
This was a project originally started by my former student and current business partner Floris Moriceau as his senior thesis. It's an interactive graphic on a Civil War site in Murfreesboro, part of the Stones River Battlefield National Monument. After his first version, we decided to redesign it and recode it as an example of an interactive graphic that works without Flash - just javascript and jquery. I did the design and graphics, Floris did the coding.
Fortress Rosecrans was a massive fort, the largest built during the war, nearly a mile wide. Almost none of it remains today, just a small section of dirt mounds, overgrown with grass and trees. The site is maintained by the National Park Service.
Rutherford Tornado
On April 9, 2009, an EF-4 tornado cut across the county of Rutherford and the city of Murfreesboro, destroying 117 homes and severely damaging more than 200 others. Tragically, but miraculously given the extent of damage, only two people were killed.
On the one-year anniversary, and at the suggestion of associate professor Ken Blake, we decided to make an interactive package in cooperation with the city's newspaper, the Daily News Journal. Students from one of our reporting classes interviewed survivors and wrote stories or made audio or Soundslide presentations, and I made the map. Originally, I was going to create the graphic in Flash, but one of my students, Floris Moriceau, a french exchange student and programmer, told me he could do it entirely with Javascript and JQuery. And indeed he did. He is now my partner in NoFlash Graphics.
The News Journal linked to the interactive package on our website, and used the map in a doubletruck in their print edition.
Orange County 8,500 years ago
More than 100,000 artifacts found on a mesa in Huntington Beach have provided insight into the lives of people who lived there in the prehistoric past. Register reporter Cindy Carcamo and I talked to a Cal State Fullerton archaeologist in an effort to recreate what the village would have been like and how the people lived. I then made two versions of a graphic, one for print (which ran on A3 in black and white) and an interactive online version. The image was made with 3D modeling software.
Katie Wheeler Library
Katie was the granddaughter of James Irvine, who founded the Irvine Ranch, a 110,000-acre property which once covered almost a third of Orange County. This new public library branch which opened in February 2008 is a replica of the Irvine family's 1906 mansion, which burned down in 1965. Although not a large public building, it's a big enough deal for the county to make the cover of the Register's local section and the front page of the Irvine World News, a Register publication.
On the link to the print version, scroll down to see how ads are creeping onto the front pages of the newspaper.
Great Wall of China
This was for a travel story written by Matthew Ralston for the OC Register issue of June 20, 2008. It was part of a section devoted to China travel. Although originally planned for a large chunk of the inside color doubletruck, the graphic eventually got crunched into a smaller space than it needed to function, that being to explain and depict all the great walls that have been built by 5 dynasties over the last 2,500 years. There was also a section on how the walls were built, but that got cut entirely from the print edition.
Reporting was done by Chantal Lamers. The print graphic ended up running in black and white on an inside page of the local section.
Environmental Nature Center
The Environmental Nature Center in Newport Beach is the county’s first structure to achieve the highest level of energy and environmental design certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. This graphic accompanied a story by Cameron Bird for the OC Register.
Reporting was done by Chantal Lamers. The print graphic ended up running in black and white on an inside page of the local section.
Chapman University
This was for a Sunday centerpiece about a private college in the city of Orange that has seen considerable growth in the last forty years. To illustrate that, the graphic plan was to do a map showing the campus in 1967 and one showing it now. I combined the two maps by making a 3D model from the building shapes and color-coding the original buildings red. Then I made an interactive version that would have either photos or captions pop up when the user mouses over the building shapes. Photos were from the University itself or from several of our photographers.
This example shows the obvious advantages of the online version — besides embedded photos, it has information about almost every building. The print version, limited to two columns, only has room for a few tags. It also ended up running black and white.
For larger projects when we have more time and personnel, the multimedia part will be done by one of our online staff.
Suprime Ground Zero
This was a great investigative story that two of the Register's business reporters, John Gittelsohn and Ron Campbell, did on the fallout from the subprime lending crash. They researched and detailed one block of one street, Camile Street in Santa Ana, which has a high number of houses bought with subprime loans and an increasing number of defaults.
For the main graphic in the newspaper, we did an overhead view of the block and highlighted the houses with subprime loans. For online, Sal Topete, one of the Register's multimedia experts, took my rendering and the text and made a nice interactive piece, complete with several embedded video clips.
Link to the story:
OC Register.com Aug. 12, 2007
