ARJUN KAKKAR

In the waning days of working from home, we asked 16 heavy hitters what book is on display in their Zoom backgrounds—and what they’re really planning to read on vacation, when no one is looking.

Role: Design, development.

Tech highlights: React

As Biden puts his stamp on the presidency, his presidency is also putting its stamp on Washington. Here’s what it looks like so far.

Role: Design, development.

Tech highlights: React, howler.js

Uncle Sam is one tough old avatar. Cartoonists and designers of all stripes have relied on him as a handy symbol of the U.S. government for ages. He’s evolved in small ways—his costume has varied, his hat and necktie have been tweaked. But it's 2021—is it time for something new?

Role: Design, development.

Tech highlights: React, swiperjs

The one stop shop for all education related news during the pandemic in NJ. A purpose built responsive landing page with a salient content management system for article placement.

Role: Design, development, google sheets interface for content management.

Tech highlights: React, aws lambda, node.js

Gritty emerged from the darkness to show us the way, Gritty is the light. We took this quite literally and gave Gritty the dramatic entrance he deserves. In fact, every section and feature of this article was designed to give the reader a peek into the soul of the mythical being that is Gritty.

Role: Design, development.

Tech highlights: PIXI.js

As the unemployment system in New Jersey melted down, we were tasked with depicting the stories of hundreds of residents living in uncertainty. To capture the scale of suffering, we created an interactive article with pictures of these families and snippets of their experiences. Centered in this was a gallery of faces, which revealed their stories on hover.

Role: Design, development, automated email requests, data collection and management.

Tech highlights: R, gmail API, scrollama, vanilla-lazyload

During the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in New Jersey, more than three dozen journalists from NJ Advance Media set out to create the most comprehensive documentation of this crisis in the state. The unique challenge here was to capture one day in the lives of 9 million residents and go to publication right after. We accomplished this by setting up four standard design patterns which were then used for each snippet of experience captured by a reporter. These snippets were then arranged in chronological order to create a cohesive picture of what living through that day was like.

Role: Design, development

Tech highlights: Custom lazyloader using intersection observer, scrollama

A self-instruction project turned immersive experience. Come to BoidGL if you want to fly with your flock of spaceships.

Role: Design, development, algorithm implementation

Tech highlights: three.js, glsl shaders

The definitive source of up to date, comprehensive counts of coronavirus cases and deaths in New Jersey and its counties. ‘nuff said.

Role: Design, development, data pipeline for hourly updates

Tech highlights: d3.js, leaflet, selectize, bootstrap, aws lambda, node.js

As New Jersey announced a statewide shutdown of businesses, some select businesses providing essential services were granted permission to stay open. We designed a platform for those businesses to post modified hours, services and latest information. Centralized in these posts are quotes from business owners to make them personable and help connect with customers. These can be filtered by county, town and business type for residents looking for a specific service in their area.

Role: Design, development, data pipeline for hourly updates

Tech highlights: shufflejs, selectize, aws lambda, node.js

The YouTube apology video is now its own genre. We set out to understand the underlying dynamics of these apologies. This involved a comprehensive documentation of major apologies, subscriber counts, features of the videos and a data based look at the consequence and reward structure that gave rise to this phenomenon. Part of this data was then presented as a visual fingerprint of the apology including features like sorries per minute, like/dislike ratio and number of cuts in the video.

Role: Methodology design, data collection, analysis and some visualization

Tech highlights: R, python, d3.js

What does the local economic impact of immigrants look like across the US? Some communities have a lot of immigrant businesses while others have industries with a lot of immigrant workers. How do we understand these contributions nationally, given this local context? We set out to answer this question by creating an index of economic contribution composed of features like rate of business ownership, tax contributions and workforce share in major industries. What emerged was an incredible picture of America with a huge variation in immigrant utilization and change in that utilization over time and space.

Role: Design, development, data analysis

Tech highlights: R, d3.js, scrollama

The classic picture of diversity in universities is based in proportional representation. Even though a good start, this picture completely misses representation in interactions, spaces of power and academic fields. As students at Williams College we tried to reimagine this metric of proportional representation at the college level. By looking at where students were choosing to live, we could start understanding the social dynamics at the school and quantify the very personal choices of who students choose to live with. Comparing where students of different races were living to a random allocation of housing, we found a strong degree of racial separation in particular dorms at the school. This was then presented in an interactive guided story to highlight these massive disparities to the administration.

Role: Design, development, data collection and analysis

Tech highlights: R, d3.js, scrollama