Hi.

Data Visualization

• Busted

  

  To present this harrowing investigation into a long-running prostitution ring in Bellevue, Washington, we needed visuals but lacked photos or graphics. Instead, working with artist Gabriel Campanario, I wrote a framework to quickly prototype and iterate on smooth scrolling animation.

• The Profanity Peak wolves

  

  Not only did they have one of the great trivia team names of all time, the Profanity Peak wolves were part of a Washington success story: wolves have mounted a successful comeback since being hunted almost to extension in the 1900's. But the story doesn't end so well for this pack—in this story, reported by Lynda V. Mapes, I downloaded DEM files, reverse-engineered reports from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and built a hand-rolled WebGL renderer to bring readers into the wolves' territory. A fuller write-up of my process is available on the Seattle Times developer blog.

• Great movies

  

  Based on an earlier project (Great reads, itself inspired by the NPR Book Concierge), this interactive provides an index of five years of the best movies reviewed by the Seattle Times. It's filterable by genre, rating, and year, and animates smoothly thanks to FLIP-powered CSS animations.

• Flying high

  

  Boeing celebrated its 100 year anniversary in 2016, and the paper re-ran a graphic in print that collected all of the aerospace giant's commercial planes. For online, that format wouldn't work, so I built this interactive, which extracted the planes from their SVG and moved them onto GPU-composited layers to soar across the background.

• Elwha: Roaring back to life

  

  Since the largest dam removal project in the world, the Elwha has experienced a resurgence, with plants and animals returning to the river. I worked with Lynda Mapes and our graphics department to tell the story online in a way that was evocative and beautiful. More details are available at our dev blog.

• Shielded by the law

  

  As the controversy over police killings grew around the country, the Seattle Times investigative team dug into the data to uncover every person killed by police in Washington over the last decade. They discovered that it's almost impossible to prosecute a cop in this state, due to a legal loophole. I worked on the presentation and opening animation of this report.

• Paper Hawks

  

  Every year, the Times puts out its Paper Hawks, one of which is blank so that readers can add themselves to the roster. This year, fans who wanted to join the team could do so digitally: I used the getUserMedia and camera APIs to literally put their faces into the image, let them adjust the hair and skin tone, and then print it out to assemble.

• Touring Chambers Bay

  

  The site of the US Open in 2015, Chambers Bay is not a typical American golf course. To demonstrate its steep verticality and unconventional hazards, I loaded the course architect's CAD file into Three.js and created this interactive tour, including hole-by-hole descriptions and video.

• Mayday Map

  

  Seattle's May Day "celebration" is always a unique news opportunity. To help readers follow the protests, I built a Node.js app that attached to the Twitter streaming API and tracked reporters via geotagging on a map, including photo and video. The result was a riveting live feed of movement between protestors and police.

• The Mobile Home Trap

  

  For this investigative series, the Seattle Times examined the shady business practices of the Warren Buffett-owned Clayton Homes. This particular piece detailed how proposed legislation would largely exempt Clayton's loans from regulations. For my interactive, I tried to highlight the effects of that change on the market, and show how the law would barely affect other mobile home vendors.

• Sell Block

  

  Another enterprise Seattle Times investigation, this piece focused on the broken promises of the Washington State prison labor industry. I worked on the visualizations for this piece, including the logo design. But it's most interesting to me because it serves as the debut for two new custom elements — <responsive-frame> for embedding elements, and <leaflet-map> for assembling the state map.

• Loaded with Lead

  

  The culmination of a year-long investigative effort, I worked on all the interactive elements for this story about lead poisoning at gun ranges in Washington State and around the country. In addition to the header and page design, I worked on the string-of-pearls chart, the interactive maps, and the cutaway diagram of Wade's shooting range. Our design was featured in a Q&A with the Society for News Design.

• Where in the World are Seahawks Fans?

  

  In 2013, the Seattle Times put out a "fan map" built on Google Fusion Tables, letting Seahawks fans tag themselves around the globe. It was a success, but we wanted something more scalable for 2014. The new version has marker clustering, AJAX form submission, and a much more polished look-and-feel. It also successfully leveraged our news app template, and the ability to use Google Docs as an ad-hoc CMS.

• Building Toward Disaster

  

  This Seattle Times interactive was designed to let readers explore more than 80 years of history leading up to the 2014 Oso landslide that killed 43 people. Reporters gathered 13 aerial photos dating back to 1933, as well as data on all of the houses, logging, red flags, and attempted fixes for the hill. I arranged the timeline vertically, which makes it easier to scroll on desktop and mobile, and linked its progress to the photos so that readers could flip through them and watch the river gradually eat away at the base of the hill.

• Against the Grain

  

  In this project, the CQ newsroom wanted to understand legislators who vote against the party line--why do they go "against the grain?" What kinds of votes garner the most dissent? To let people browse through our database of party unity votes, we built this web application in object-oriented Javascript and HTML. As readers move through the data, new panels will open to the right, but they can return to an earlier fork in their search at any time. This interactive was a powerful experiment, not just as a standalone interactive, but also as an exploration of new UI for CQ's extensive (but cumbersome) vote database.

• Who Owns the Debt?

  

  As the debt limit debate neared its deadline, my team at CQ produced several graphics on the history of the debate, past attempts to raise the limit, and the composition of the debt in question. In this interactive, built in HTML/JavaScript, we pulled apart the components of the debt to see just what was owed to whom. It was featured, along with its companion, on the front page of the Economist's web site.