Cut Short

In collaboration with reporter Alyssa Fowers, I designed and developed a story memorializing the 1 million covid deaths milestone.

It was important to treat this topic with sensitivity and respect for the real people whose lives were lost in the pandemic, rather than turning them into impersonal data points on a chart or generic statistics, which people in general have difficulty emphathizing with.

Even so, the data was an important aspect of capturing the scale of the pandemic. The entire page was essentially a long vertical chart, but used a personal sentence about a specific person as the scale “bar.”

Visually, I used slow CSS and Javascript-based animations and ample whitespace to evoke the feeling of a meditation or reflection, without being grim.

Computer-generated graphics can sometimes feel too “clean”, so I added handwritten details and pencil-style SVG textures for a more human touch.