Apollo 11: why we chose the simple over the complex
Scrollytelling mission reports, rockets whizzing through star-filled backgrounds and augmented reality moonwalks: the Apollo 11 anniversary spawned a flurry of digital projects that were almost as complex as the mission itself.
On the Times interactive team we’re always looking for an excuse to show off what we’re capable of. But six weeks out from the 50th anniversary on 20 July, we faced a dilemma.
Our goal was to show what could have gone wrong using the near misses and moments of panic to emphasise how close the Apollo 11 mission came to failure.
But we were yet to decide the treatment: did we go down the complicated, all singing all dancing interactive approach and build an immersive, development-intensive interactive page? Or did we simplify our visual style and lean on a few old tricks to bring the story to life and allow ourselves more time to perfect the content?
As visual journalists a lot of what we do is abstraction. The charts we build are not realistic depictions of life but present a useful angle in a simple, numeric format. Crime doesn’t actually look like a bar chart and inflation isn’t a moving line, but both those visualisations are useful, interpretable ways of showing those things. What if we applied the same philosophy to the moon landings?
Space travel graphics can be encyclopaedic — there is so much information to convey that they become crowded. Stripping them back to the key points can focus the reader on information relevant to the copy. This allows the graphics to communicate a specific message, rather than overloading the reader with information.
Out went the twinkling black backgrounds, hyper-realistic rockets and photographs of astronauts. Instead, we developed a minimalist style which worked for charts and diagrams alike.
This helped our readers see parts of the mission not as they recognised them in grainy 1960s footage, but in an everyday context: how the Saturn V was taller than the Elizabeth tower, how the moonwalk covered an area the size of a football pitch and how Armstrong and Aldrin could barely stand inside the cramped lunar module.
Five weeks out we had decided on our style but it took a three-hour storyboarding session for the piece to really take shape. We went through the draft copy line by line, discussing with our brilliant designers the best way of presenting each step. Being there in person, focused on the project, allowed us to efficiently debate ideas as we thought of them and make sure everyone understood the aim of the project.
The most challenging graphics explained the complex mathematics required to send astronauts 200,000 miles from earth. We wanted to show how a few minutes difference in rocket engine burn time could produce catastrophic results at two points in the mission: leaving earth’s orbit and approaching the moon.
For these two graphics we sketched out rocket paths for three potential routes: what would happen if they burned too early, or too short; what happened if they burned too late, or for too long; and the “goldilocks” route. We decided to use animation to make them clearer, having each path trace one by one.
We could have used GIFs or videos but instead went for a solution inspired by a previous project. Back in 2015, we produced an explainer on GCHQ, where the user scrolled through the article to trace the paths of SVG line drawings. This technique looked like the neatest way of tracing the rocket’s path through space. It’s also extremely efficient for a reader’s bandwidth and load-time.
To complement the animations, the copy described the three paths of the rocket in the order that they appeared, leading the reader through the visuals step by step.
The other graphics were done with AI2html artboards, a Times interactive team staple. This gave us the greatest control over what our readers saw and allowed us to prioritise clarity and resist the temptation to pack each graphic with unnecessary annotation.
Ultimately our decision was vindicated. We were able to spend our time focusing on the graphics and the words, rather than the technology that underpinned them.
But above all, our aim was reader enjoyment. The evidence suggests we were successful: we received hundreds of positive comments, while the average reader spent six minutes on the article. It also had more readers than any other story we published on the moon landing.
There will always be a drive in interactive journalism to produce bigger, better and more complicated pieces to wow your readers (and impress your peers). But in the end, just like Buzz Aldrin fixing a lunar module circuit breaker with a felt-tip pen, sometimes the simple solution is the best one.
You can read our moon landing piece here.
