I am proud to have contributed to two projects that have been honoured with awards this year. Sucked Dry by InfoNile and Neglected and Unmapped by Tonye Bakare.
I particularly enjoy designing long-form articles and love the outcome. Not only is it an aesthetic way to tell a story but we can make it interactive and engaging for the readers by presenting data using different mediums. Below I will describe some of the creative techniques used in our award-winning articles.
Sucked Dry won the Best Data Visualisation Award by WAN-IFRA African Digital Media Awards in December 2020. It also won 3rd prize in the “Outstanding Investigative Reporting” category of the Fetisov Journalism Awards in Switzerland in April 2021.
The article, supported by Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, describes the land grabbing due to foreign investments that have been encroaching the banks of the fertile river Nile across all the countries in the Nile basin. As a result, whole communities have been displaced and lost the land they had tended for generations. Misuse of water for profits in arid regions such as the Gulf and deforestation in Uganda are some other outcomes of unsustainable land deals in the Nile region. The introduction of foreign industries may at first seem like a boon to the locals but abandonment, mistreatment and neglect of the stolen lands has left whole communities hopeless in its wake.
Along with the excellent on-field reporting by Infonile journalists, the presentation of data played a large role in the impact of the story.
I created a 2-minute motion graphic sequence that presented collective data about land deals in the entire Nile Basin. Although this was my first attempt at such a large endeavour, I persisted.
Keyframe animation using Adobe After effects CC is an excellent choice for presenting data because it uses vectors. Scalable vectors made with precise measurements can maintain the accuracy of data.
In hindsight, there are many things I would change and I am still learning about better workflow and effects. However, I am very excited about some of the effects I was able to pull off in this animation especially around 1:10.
You can watch it here
When describing changes to land and water over time, there is no better tool than satellite imagery. Google Earth has a developed a fantastic collection of images over the years and we can now clearly see significant changes over the past 30 years. In the story, we have used Google Timelapse which is an off-shoot feature that is incredible for looking at incremental changes. However, the largest impact comes from seeing a before and after image. Flourish sliders helped us create just that.
The development of the Setit dam to support the water-guzzling alfalfa industry displaced whole communities within only a few years. Where there was land, now there is water. The consequent scarcity of land in Sudan has caused tribal conflicts and large scale poverty.
The most striking feature of Sucked Dry was the imagery captured using drone technology by the InfoNile team. As a designer, I appreciated the clarity of the video as well as the perspective of a bird-eye view or the hovering over large areas, a feat that is very difficult to achieve otherwise.
Drone imagery was also used to great effect in Neglected and Unmapped — mapping Makoko. You can read more about it below.
Read more on these related links:
Wan-ifra Award for Best Data Visualisation
The project that is affectionally called “Mapping Makoko” won the Sigma Award in June 2021.
Makoko is an inner-city slum in Nigeria, a third of which is built on water. There are intricate systems for the people to get around even on the water and with a population of over 300,000 Makoko has grown into a small city. Its status as a slum, however, meant that it wasn’t considered as a part of Nigeria by authorities and didn’t get the resources it deserved from the government. So the team put Makoko literally on the map. Using drone imagery and openstreet technology as well as the help of young locals, Makoko is now a detailed area on maps with over 80 points of interest and counting.
This project was a huge collaboration between Code For Africa, technology partners, news partners and the Makoko community itself. It was also funded by Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting. The project has been featured on Aljazeera, CNN and other networks. Head over to the article to read about the journey of mapping Makoko and get an eyeful of some incredible images and maps.
Along with some of the visualisations, we created the sliders in the article that show the tremendous progress made by the team in mapping Makoko.
Read more on these related links:
Neglected and Unmapped by Tonye Bakare
