What Would Jennifer Do

It’s my first full week at Businessweek. It’s bananatown. They work e v e r y d a y. It’s going to take awhile to get used to the transition from freelance to full-time.

This week I worked on the first of a series of features that are told graphically- no accompanying essay- just letting the graphic say it all. This style of visual-story telling is something I see a lot of newspapers tackling but few magazines. Some call these “charticles” but I prefer to call it “journalism”.

It started with a meeting with Caroline Winter and David Glovin. Businessweek wanted to outline the madness of the Galleon case and all the characters involved and what tips they allegedly shared amongst each other. The center of many of the insider tips, Raj Rajaratnam, was going to court this week and David had an infinitely helpful manic excel spreadsheet of notes he’d been taking for a number of years. After we parsed out all the connections between the people involved in the case I came up with a bare bones sketch showing a rough idea of how all the tips were shared amongst the players.

The creation of this sketch is fairly easy- by translating the spreadsheet of connections into a very simple .dot language (which I would barely call programming) I was able to open it in OmniGraffle (a fundamental IA application) which did most of the data visualization and spit out the above graphic.

After the connections were established I was able to start working on a illustrator sketch- working out colors and details.

The final graphic ran in issue 12 of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Best viewed LARGE.

Posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 10:03 pm in businessweek, infographics | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback