Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Learning
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Forms Matter
By Lena Groeger
Posted onWhether you’re filling out a form or building it yourself, you should be aware that decisions about how to design a form have all kinds of hidden consequences. How you ask a question, the order of questions, the wording and format of the questions, even whether a question is included at all—all affect the final result.
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Ms. Management: I Hope You Find the Time to Read this Column
By Stacy-Marie Ishmael
Posted onIf you’re the kind of person who is into both checks on the executive branch and the finer points of employment law, you may already have come across the case of KNTV, Inc. and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, AFL–CIO. If not—and who can blame you—a quick primer: that case set the precedent that an employer’s use of the phrase “I hope you” could be reasonably construed as “coercive.”
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Ms. Management: Whose Stories Do We Consider?
By Stacy-Marie Ishmael
Posted onOn books, checklists, and the cumulative effect of unconscious decisions.
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If It Needs a Sign, It’s Probably Bad Design
By Lena Groeger
Posted onAdding more text is a bad way to compensate for bad design.
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Discrimination by Design
By Lena Groeger
Posted onDiscriminatory design and decision-making affects all aspects of our lives: from the quality of our health care and education to where we live to what scientific questions we choose to ask. Here are just a few of the many tangible, visual examples that humans interact with every day.
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Interactive Data Journalism: A One-Semester Syllabus
By Jonathan Stray
Posted onData journalism draws on a remarkable array of skills—everything from statistics to graphic design to FOIA requests.
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A 3D Walkthrough for Breaking News
By Eli J. Murray
Posted onWe knew we wanted to tell the story in a way that was more concrete than just words on a page. We decided to create a 3D graphic that would tell the story of that night’s events.
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Five Things I Learned Making a Chart Out of Body Parts
By Lena Groeger
Posted onLast year, an interactive graphic about insurance turned out to be one of ProPublica’s most popular pieces of the year. I’m going to tell you about some things we learned in the process of designing and building it, from its bovine origin story to the challenges of visualizing an eyeball.
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Too Human (Not) to Fail
By Lena Groeger
Posted onLots of everyday objects are designed to prevent errors—saving clumsy and forgetful humans from our own mistakes or protecting us from worst-case scenarios. Sometimes designers make it impossible for us to mess up, other times they build in a backup plan for when we inevitably do. But regardless, the solution is baked right into the design.
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How Typography Can Save Your Life
By Lena Groeger
Posted onTypography is an aesthetic choice, but it’s also an interface element that can help keep drivers and astronauts safe—or put real people in danger.
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Seeing the Error of Your Ways
By Lena Groeger
Posted onChances are, you probably think your mind works pretty well. But, in reality, our brains fool us all the time with blind spots and biases. So what can we do about it? Let’s examine how graphics, including charts, interactives and other visual tools, can help show us the shortcomings of our own minds.
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Data Journalism Should Thrive on Cross-Border Collaborations—Why Doesn’t It?
By Eva Constantaras
Posted onMixed skill sets, varying audiences and a basic lack of agreement on the purpose of journalism stand in the way of multi-country, data-driven journalism. But Eva Constantaras says the potential is too great to give up on.
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Introducing broca
By Francis Tseng
Posted onMade at our recent code convening, broca creates a system for easier experimentation and implementation of natural language processing.
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On Repeat
By Lena Groeger
Posted onGIFs and other looped images are mightier than journalists might imagine. Lena Groeger explains the legend, the myth, the GIF.
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Why Journalism Students Don’t Learn CS
By Lindsey Cook
Posted onOpportunities overfloweth in journalism code—so why aren’t more journalism students signing up for computer science classes? Lindsey Cook reports back on a year of research.
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Audio in the Browser: Horrors and Joys
By Tyler Fisher
Posted onOn the web, audio has never received the wide browser support that images and videos have enjoyed. What gives? What’s next?
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Automating Transparency
By Ed Summers
Posted onSometimes you write a piece of software and it gets used for purposes you didn’t quite imagine at the time. Sometimes you write a piece of software and it unexpectedly rearranges your life.
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The Evolution of NPR’s Picture Stories
By Wes Lindamood
Posted onHow NPR’s picture stories have changed—and the design principles and iterative work behind all the changes.
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Consider the Boolean
By Jacob Harris
Posted onThe challenge of using binary data structures in a complicated world.
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Understanding Households and Relationships in Census Data
By Anthony DeBarros
Posted onThe Census Bureau’s population counts make trends in household makeup easy to track. All you need are two things: an understanding of how the Census asks Americans about households and relationships, and where to find the right tables amid the haystack of tabulations. That’s what this post aims to help you with.
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