Designing Lost on the Frontline
Timeline: Aug 2020 | Visit link
Description: I was part of a beautiful effort to create an online memorial dedicated to the healthcare workers who died fighting the pandemic. The memorial also serves as a database, as data was collected and presented as part of a larger series. The Guardian worked with newsroom Kaiser Health News and freelance journalists to make this a reality.
Technical summary:
Developed experience that allowed learning and mourning
Create design and visual style guide
Developed experience that allowed for learning and mourning
Lost on the Frontline aimed to answer to large questions; how can we honor victims of Covid? And how can we do so in a way that provides context surrounding their lives and deaths?
To start, quite a few sketches and iterations were made. I was the sole designer, and spoke weekly with members of both the Kaiser Health News and the Guardian teams to provide updates, so there was a lot of meetings and balancing the needs of stakeholders.
Most importantly were the readers. Our target was to make this page a resource for people to visit a place on the internet dedicated to their lost loved one. But it was also meant to provide information for researchers looking into the PPE provided to early healthcare workers. As such, It was important to empathize with both readers looking to learn, and mourners looking to mourn.
I was able to walk the balance by taking a modular approach to how the elements were laid out on the page. This allowed me to approach the problem systemically, and once the experience was solid, I spent most of my time giving the UI an air of gravity, and a distinctive dose of color.
Create a design system for a database
The Lost on the Frontline database was the centerpiece of the entire series, but there were still other stories and elements that needed my consideration. Alongside crafting the user experience of the database, I worked to come up with a visual branding for the series. Instead of attempting at winging it, I took the slow and steady approach, and went about documented every page and keeping the screenshots handy. This database was a product, and went through a similar lifecycle.
A lot of supporting information took the form of data, so I created multiple variations of maps, bar charts, and other such things in order to better tell the story. This also meant that the website took on many iterations over its lifespan.