CQ.com home page redesign

Code / Nov. 10, 2014

A previous design change to CQ.com proved unpopular with customers. This design provided better page hierarchy and structure and shifted the page’s focus from time-consuming curated news wells to CQ Now, a partially automated feed of breaking news, updates and other key content. Click for a more complete view.

cq home

50 Richest Members of Congress

Interactives / Sep. 13, 2013

The annual 50 Richest Members of Congress project is big deal in CQ Roll Call land. This year 27 reporters, researchers, developers and fact-checkers worked on the project over the past 3 months. It’s generally a big hit and gets oodles of page views months and months after it goes up. This year we added lots more data, like breakdowns of asset types, with filtering, sorting and a graph view to help navigate through all the numbers.

50richest

Syria chemical weapons graphics

Interactives, Mapping / Sep. 13, 2013

Used Natural Earth’s raster files for the first time for the top map — their stuff is just gorgeous. And for you d3.js people: if the globe in the timeline look familiar, yes I repurposed Mike Bostock’s world tour. Page is here.

syria-maps

Race ratings interactive

Interactives, Mapping / Sep. 3, 2013

This interactive uses the newest version of my house districts map featuring faster load, render and zoom speeds.

race-ratings

Congressional districts choropleth

Code, Interactives, Mapping / Aug. 7, 2013

Hispanic Population by Congressional District

A d3.js map with constrained pan and zoom + bonus bars showing distribution + fun transitions limiting the view to Republican- or Democrat-controlled districts + hovers on the map give you the Rep’s name. A little overkill, perhaps, since there isn’t a strong editorial mission for this guy. The distribution bars were done for an immigration story in CQ Weekly to make the point that most Republicans in the House don’t have too much to fear from Hispanics in their home districts, and to name the few GOP outliers.

But 2014 election graphics are nigh, which means maps! So we attached this data to the beta version of our 113th House Congressional district map.

For this version, I trimmed the Census Bureau’s district shape file, which extends boundaries into lakes and oceans, to land boundaries using QGIS. Then I used TopoJSON to reduce the 110MB GeoJSON file down to around 300k, keeping only around 2.7% of the points. The result gives a acceptable detail scaled up to 5x. Sadly that isn’t enough resolution to make out Manhattan and some Los Angles districts, so I pushed the scale extent to 6 so that you can hover and find New York 10, even if simplification has made the island little more than a crooked rectangle. Another issue with the large scale factor is the state boundaries, which came from the National Atlas, don’t align perfectly to the district boundaries — the result of the simplification having different effects on the two GeoJSON files.

For the next version I’m going to try projected TopoJSON in hopes that it saves enough render time to put some more detail back in the map. Not sure what to do about the state boundaries other than edit the paths by hand in QGIS :-\

Senate votes for immigration reform — 2006 and today

Code, Interactives / Jun. 6, 2013

immigration-vote

Immigration Bill: Will Past Be Prologue? My first project using d3.js takes a look at how the Senate votes for a immigration overhaul in 2006, and how the Senate today might be able to reach 60 votes to pass such a measure again.

Broccoli boy

Design / May. 13, 2013

18cover

CQ Weekly cover 27

Design / Jul. 16, 2012