2023 wrapped
Looking back at my work and key moments from the year
As the year draws to a close, it’s time again to reflect on life and work. While 2022 was mostly about transitioning out of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023 provided the time to set new goals and work towards them.
Besides my News graphics work, I have engaged in a lot more teaching and training activities throughout the year, something that gives me immense joy. I have also worked towards building new habits and detaching from bad ones to prioritise my physical and mental health, which has been a refreshing experience!
The start of the year at work felt more like a continuation of 2022, given the continued coverage of the Ukraine war. One of the first pieces of 2023 was about reflecting on a “year of the conflict”. We had already covered in detail, the war tactics and the humanitarian cost of the conflict. So, we wanted to focus on something that could highlight the spirit of Ukraine’s resilience — the fact that not only did it survive the siege, but also fought back a mighty opponent.
Proud to have been a part of the graphics coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was honoured as the “Story of the Year” by Reuters and was also recognised by awards in various categories by the Society for News Design, including one for my page design portfolio.
Another important project was in the works for quite some time – a five-part special report that dives deep into how human destruction of wild areas is amplifying pandemic risk from bats. For the project, data reporters worked with specialists to develop an epidemiological simulation using disease dynamics, population size and density, regional commuting patterns, and worldwide airline traffic to understand how a contagion spill from the Amazon might prove catastrophic — a scenario scientists say could easily happen.
I had the opportunity to design and develop this visualisation for the story. Over a couple of months, I analysed and iterated on possible representations of the simulated data before settling on a globe-driven narrative. It took me quite some time to build and polish it using d3 (a data visualisation library for the web), a game rendering engine and some smart hacks!
I spent a couple of weeks in February travelling and also fulfilling my duties as a visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, India. At the Bangalore campus, I taught Information Design students how to make maps in QGIS and tell a story with geospatial data. At the Gandhinagar campus, I instructed students studying Design management, how to make sense of data for actionable insights and decisionmaking.
Some of the student projects also received recognition at the Information is Beautiful awards!
It was a great feeling to interact with students in a classroom and not on a Google Classroom screen.
One of the highlights of my travels was the visit to the Taj Mahal, finally. It truly is breathtaking and photographs don’t do enough justice to this beautiful “Wonder of the World”.
It was also a season of weddings, so here’s a snap of me celebrating my friends starting new chapters of their lives!
Back at work, we wanted to take some time out for a little passion project — Eurovision. We first covered it in 2021, talking about how the musical vibe has changed over the years in the contest. This year, we wanted to capture the energy of the event while attempting a “beautiful” way to showcase the songs. We compiled all the Eurovision songs available on Spotify to create an audio archive for each country. We also analysed these archives to compare how each song measures against the rest using the six metrics Spotify assigns to each song. Besides the data collection and analysis, one of the things I most enjoyed building was the music player.
So happy that amidst all the news coverage this year, this project won “Best Graphic” at the Los Angeles Press Club awards!
Judges’ comment: “The Reuters team created bright, beautiful, educational, and eye-popping graphics that paired perfectly with a history of the world’s most famous pop music competition, Eurovision.”
The next story I picked up was about Europe’s nuclear energy and it was a lovely experience reading up on some high school Physics along with Anurag, who beautifully illustrated the reactor schematics. This project was a unique experience simply because of the scope and scale — working with reporters, industry experts and my teammates.
I also spent a lot of time on a background project with Jon, working on a Design system for our News graphics. We conceptualised it based on how we design our pages to develop a scalable and flexible system that can power our component library. I will talk about how we built it in a separate post, but it relies a ton on CSS variables and style tokens.
As we were looking for our next story amidst all the natural disasters and catastrophes, we got pulled into covering another conflict, this time in the Middle East. We started reporting using whatever data we could gather about the conflict and the humanitarian crisis, using maps and charts. This is something that will carry over into the new year.
One of the memorable events this year was the ‘Art of Code’ — a month-long showcase of computational art in Bangalore. It was great hearing about creativity from generative artists and learning about NFTs. I even minted one myself!
In the latter half of the year, I had the opportunity to interact with folks from a few new places — the National Institute of Design, Haryana, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology and CPL Fellows. It was great talking about information design and data visualisation with different audiences with varied goals and outcomes.
As I prepare to head into a new year, here’s to more data visualisations and “transforming information to knowledge” for everyone!
