Jamie Ferguson
Product Designer / Sydney, Australia
The Global Mail was a short-lived, not-for-profit news organisation that focussed on long-form storytelling and data-driven journalism.
My role was as the design lead (and sole designer) for editorial & data-visualisation projects. As part of a small team I was involved in all aspects of the project - from research, ideation and design, through to cleaning data - working closely with developers, the amazing journalists and editorial staff.
As The Global Mail ceased operations some time ago only a two of these projects remain online. I have linked to them where possible.
My role
- Ideation
- UI/UX Design
- Data Visualisation
- Illustration
Case study Behind The Wire
The opportunity
The journalists who created the Detention Logs project had managed to secure via FOI requests reports of various incidents in Australia’s privately run Refugee Detention Centres, but were unsure how to present it in a way that would be understandable in an editorial context. They partnered with TGM for this reason.
Process
Early on we identified the difficult nature not only of the data, which was heavily redacted, inconsistently filed and opaquely written, but also in how we would visualise it in a meaningful way. Standard ways of displaying data like charts were quickly dismissed as they were either unclear or misleading due to how open to interpretation a lot of the reports were.
We decided that the inconsistencies in the data were actually part of its value so we looked for a way to present it in a non-biased way and let readers draw their own conclusions.
We ended up mapping each data point out as it’s own square, broken down by month. Readers could then browse these data points and ‘Flag’ the incident as one of interest. They would be prompted to share the incident as a way to raise awareness in the community. Seeing them presented like this provided a sense of scale due to the volume of the incidents, but also showed the stark reality where an electricity failure was recorded in the same way as someone found dead from hanging.
Outcome
The finished piece received great feedback and was felt to be quite a powerful way of presenting important information about the way these people are being treated, which would otherwise go unnoticed.
The Global Mail was dissolved only months after releasing this project so we never got to fully see the effect it could have had.
Projects that are still live
Unfortunately these are the only projects that are still live from my time at The Global Mail. (Note: Some of the fonts are not longer rendering correctly).
Additional work
Party Lines
'Party Lines' attempted to look at the way politicians use language to frame certain topics. We took Hansard data and made it easy to compare the usage of certain words and phrases over time.
Poli/talk
Expanding on 'Party Lines', the 'Poli/talk' project attempted to allow further investigation of Hansard data by making it easy for journalists and the public explore the words used by politicians in partliament. Unfortunately this never got beyond concept stage.
