Possibly the biggest reason for my role at NPR was to create all the graphics and visual branding for the 2020 election coverage. Planning months in advance, this included (but not limited to) House and Senate winner cards, live blog banner, listen live card, election update card, Trump and Biden winner cards for all 50 and territories, final elected winner, variations for Instagram’s format, and more.
I focused heavily on readability and clean design. The winner cards in particular took some time to get final approval on as we worked to nail down size of elements and the language used. We settled on the Presidential winner cards being all blue (D) or red (R) so as very easily distinguishable as which party won. The names of the states were set in the largest font as the color already gave away the candidate.
I also wanted to include the number of electoral votes the state had earned as well as the outline of the state. Since NPR did not have access to detailed vectors of the states, I went ahead and outlined them all with Adobe Illustrator. Suffice it to say I now am in possession of a nice library of individual states in vector format.
Please see NPR’s 2020 election coverage across digital platforms for all of these and more in action.