You've seen your year in music.
Now, see your year in news.
Now, see your year in news.
In 2022, I was part of the team assembled to create Newsprint — a year-end review for Washington Post subscribers. In the early stages, we brainstormed what kind of data readers might like to see. Just like Spotify Wrapped, we wanted to give news readers something to brag about: their favorite authors, their top sections, their total articles read. To make the product even more valuable, we used this data to recommend each person with newsletters and articles that fit with their interests.
Every reader has a unique Newsprint.
To build this product, I created dozens of mock-ups in Illustrator and Figma. From the beginning, I wanted Newsprint to be edgy and sleek while still looking quintessentially Washington Post. We decided on the name "Newsprint" to invoke the individuality associated with fingerprints, which led me to create the product's cover graphic: a customized fingerprint with each reader's real data animated among the whorls. I drew dozens of fingerprint patterns in Illustrator, experimented with typography, exported them as .SVG files, made a mock-up of the animation I wanted in After Effects, and passed it along to our brilliant engineer who brought the idea to life.
Your year in news... a year in the making
Newsprint evolved from a crazy idea to a real product in less than a year, but with plenty of twists along the way. We changed the name of the product three times, each of which led to a totally new style guide fit to the brand. Shown above is one of the early style guides for an abandoned iteration of Newsprint known as "Lookback."
Below are some of our two feuding design mocks — one for something serious, one for something fun. (In the end, we ended up somewhere between them both.)
Making Headlines
Newsprint launched on November 30th. We were the first newsroom to create a product of this type, which was recognized in The World Association of News Publishers, What's New In News, Neiman Labs, and Editor & Publisher. You can read The Post's product announcement here.
Spotify Wrapped Redesign
Wrapped Day, my favorite national holiday
I look forward to the drop of Spotify Wrapped every year for the same reasons as everyone else: I love music, I love having an opinion on it, and I love sharing that opinion in a well-packaged graphic. In 2021, I took my ideas to a new level by designing a proposed "redesign" of Spotify Wrapped. (In hindsight, it's less of a "redesign" than an extension of the existing product.)
The effort was multifaceted; I wanted more simplistic copywriting and missed the fluid graphics from Spotify Wrapped's earlier days. But most importantly, I had four ideas for new data points: what music do you listen to at various times of day? Which artists were quick flings and which ones were year-long commitments? Where do you discover most of your songs? And if you had a music festival made of your favorite artists, what would the poster look like?
My design, December 2021
Spotify Wrapped, December 2022
My design, December 2021
Instafest App, December 2022
Real-World Implementations
I posted my original redesign on LinkedIn. Within months, I had over 2 million views, 26,000 reactions, and even attention from Spotify themselves. When Spotify Wrapped dropped in 2022, I saw one of the pages from my redesign come to life! Around the same time, a designer named Anshay Saboo published a concert poster generator called Instafest.app. I have no way of knowing if either of these works were inspired by mine, but it’s pretty cool to know I have ideas worth chasing!