Project Intro
As you can imagine, 2017–2021 were critical years for environmental journalism. As the sun set on this trying period, Grist wanted to pause and take stock of how far we, as a nation, had slipped on environmental concerns that affect us all, and what could be done to reverse course going forward.
highlights
In order to accomplish such a significant and complex task, Grist teamed up with CMYK to ideate, design, and develop long-format data visualizations to communicate the breadth of regulatory rollbacks and the scale of damage these have and could have on the environment.
Starting with a general outline of the proposed content, CMYK worked to build connections between the raw data in order to create a compelling narrative for our designers and developers to sink their teeth into.
Over the course of just a month-and-a-half, we designed a series of four animated sequences that dive deep into a series of new regulations or de-regulations and their consequences on American health and the economy, using collage-style images and text overlays.
Additionally, we created an interactive swarm chart to visualize all environmental rollbacks during the 2017 – 2021 administration era, allowing users to isolate individual examples or filter by topic and direct link to reference files and sites. Finally, we packaged up the entire article into a plugin file that could be easily handed off to Grist’s internal IT team to install on their WordPress site, allowing them to seamlessly publish the article while maintaining full control of the larger site’s content.