“A Seed is Forever” wins award
My master’s project, “A Seed is Forever,” recently won an award at the 2010 Online Journalism Awards. It won the “Best Student Multimedia Feature Presentation” award, of which I’m very proud. This is what the judges said about my project:
“The judges decided that this was a winning entry because we were really impressed by the quality of the production of this piece. We were also really impressed that it was all put together by a single journalist. The reporter did the reporting, did the programming of the flash site, did the design work, the video editing, without really compromising the quality of any of those different elements. The story allows you to follow two different threads using guides. We thought that this is something we’d like to see more of generally in the news industry–helping lead the reader through the story, and this is what this piece managed to do very well.”
Now that the project has gotten some recognition, I need some help getting it published somewhere so that it can accomplish what I originally set out to do: bring awareness to the subject of my project, youth and agriculture in Sierra Leone. Got any ideas?
Journalism Experiment #4: The grid is your friend…use it
If you’re a journalist thinking about building your own site from the ground up, good for you. Here’s a word of advice, though. If you’re one of those coding amateurs out there like me, save yourself some trouble and use a grid. For starters, a grid will give you that “fit and finish” you see in all those good-looking sites not built by journalists. A grid also makes it easy to transfer your design from Photoshop to the Web, which is the basic process for all good Web design (thanks Richard Koci Hernandez for that secret).
For one of my classes at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, I had to use the grid to design a homepage for a site. I chose to revamp the site I helped design for our school’s Africa reporting class. A little ambitious for a beginner, but I thought I’d give it a try because, hey, I’m down for trying new things. Or, at least, that’s what I initially thought.
I wanted to take this (built using a WordPress template):
And turn it into something like this (designed from scratch):
This is what I ended up with:
As you can see, it’s not an exact replica. I had the most difficulty with getting everything to line up on the grid and work (it’s an easy concept but takes a lot of thought and care). On the other hand, I’ll admit, I had the most fun with creating the header, which is a compilation of several background images and CSS (thanks to my other instructor Josh Williams).
If I had more time, I would have liked to build out this map page prototype for the site as well:
Maybe another time, I guess.