ToddAndWes.info
Main | Geocodex | Dynamic charts | Print charts
Who are #toddandwes?
Todd Stewart, Design & Multimedia Editor, Orlando Sentinel; todd@toddandwes.info
Wes Meltzer, Information Design Editor, Orlando Sentinel; wes@toddandwes.info
Presentation: Visual Journalism: The Future is Now
(2011/10/27) The days when newspaper designers and artists only worked in print or on the Web are gone. Today’s visual journalists are going into uncharted territory as they simultaneously design and program for multiple platforms at once: print, digital, mobile and tablet. It sounds scary at first, but Orlando Sentinel design editors Todd Stewart and Wes Meltzer are here to show you it isn’t. Here’s how to strategize for each platform while staying true to your journalistic foundation.
Presentation materials
Resources
- Our work, if you want to see it again
- Dynamic graphics
- Google Chart Tools for the simpler dynamic graphics we have on this page.
- Protovis for the more complex and more sophisticated graphics that you will want to do as you learn more.
- Data and maps
- Geocodex A tool that takes comma- or tab-delimited input from a spreadsheet, geocodes the locations using the Google Maps geocoder, and returns CSV or KML for input to Google Fusion Tables.
- USC's geocoding service from the university's GIS Research Laboratory. If you have more than, say, 3,000 requests in a day, you should use this, because Google throttles geocoding requests.
QGIS for journalists A tutorial from Len DeGroot of the Knight Digital Media Center on how to use QGIS to make a choropleth map.
For online maps, where people have come to expect that their maps are going to behave like Google/MapQuest/Yahoo, Wes prefers to go to Step 8 ("Set a color range based on data") and then export it to Google Fusion Tables, skipping the intermediary steps of adding roads and other features and exporting as an HTML image map.
- ColorBrewer A really cool interactive tool for building color schemes. It's designed for maps, but you can use it for just about any graphic that you need multiple color schemes for.
- Programming
- Mr. Data Converter Shan Carter's tool to convert your Excel data to HTML, JSON or XML. If you need your data in one of these formats, this is definitely the way to go.
- jQuery The JavaScript library that makes JavaScript worth using. It fills in browser compatibility gaps, provides a universal base of functions, and has an extremely robust community of plugins that often allow you to avoid coding. (!)
- underscore.js This is advanced JavaScript, for once you start needing to do really complicated stuff. The guys who develop underscore.js call it "the tie to along with jQuery's tux," and that's exactly right! Their _.each() is vastly superior to jQuery's $.each(); _.reduce() simmers an array down to one return value; and _.sortBy() allows you to sort an array of values by an arbitrary function.
- Help resources
- Stack Exchange is where I turn whenever I have a problem with... just about anything. It's a forum for programmers to answer each others' questions. Awesome.
- Google Fusion Tables API Users Group for those thorny Fusion Tables issues. You may periodically see questions (or answers) from me on this board, so if you really hated my presentation, you probably won't find this useful!
Legalese
© Wes Meltzer and Todd Stewart, 2011. License for all content copyrighted by Meltzer and Stewart: MIT. All linked content, libraries and APIs are used under their own respective licenses and terms of use.