The annual SND Best of Digital Design competition brought 21 professionals together across timezones using Zoom and other virtual platforms to judge the best work of 2020. The judges are broken into six groups — a features team, two graphics teams, two news teams and a product team. There also are three conflict judges.
Features
Jan Diehm, The Pudding
Jan is a journalist-engineer at The Pudding. She appreciates the finer things in life like LEGO sets, southern delicacies, like pimento cheese and fried green tomatoes, and vintage Britney Spears. She lives in San Antonio with her wife and blind cat, Woo.
Corinne Chin, The Seattle TimesCorinne is a senior video journalist at The Seattle Times and the founder and leader of the newsroom’s diversity and inclusion task force. Her work has been recognized by the Online News Association; Radio Television Digital News Association/National Edward R. Murrow Awards; NPPA Best of Photojournalism; Pictures of the Year International; Society for News Design; and more. Corinne is a graduate of the Poynter Leadership Academy for Women; the Poynter-NABJ Leadership Academy for Diversity; the ASNE Emerging Leaders Institute; and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She is a co-director of the Asian American Journalists Association’s affinity group, Women and Non-Binary Voices, and she is a past president of AAJA Seattle.
Michael Grant, Get Current Studio
Michael is an editorial experience designer and founder of Get Current Studio — a creative agency that gives special consideration to BIPOC-owned media with a focus on emerging technologies. He also is an alumnus of the 2018 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, where he explored digital readiness among ethnic media publishers. Recently, Michael spent a year and a half as a teaching fellow at the Google News Lab. Prior, he was user experience design editor at Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting, where he directed special projects.
Graphics 1
Dawn Cai, The New York TimesDawn is a Chinese-born designer, graphics journalist and visual storyteller. She joined The New York Times in 2019 as a graphics/multimedia editor, and since then, she has covered multiple major news events from the Notre Dame fire to Trump’s impeachment to the coronavirus. Prior to joining The Times, she worked in Singapore with Reuters as a data visualization developer and in D.C. with The Washington Post as an art director and graphics editor.
Julius Troger, Zeit Online
Julius is the head of visual journalism at Zeit Online with a team of journalists, developers and designers creating data visualizations and experimental story formats. Until 2018, he was the head of the Berliner Morgenpost interactive team in Germany.
Xaquín González Veira, Visualization for Transparency FoundationXaquín is a Galician visual journalist and open data activist — and Roi’s dad. His most recent obsessions include emotional connections in data visualization, automation of data-driven visual narratives and visualization for the public good. He has worked at The Guardian, National Geographic and The New York Times. In an alternative universe, he runs a truck selling tortillas de patata (potato).
Graphics 2
Priya Krishnakumar, CNNPriya is an editor on CNN’s visual news desk covering race, inequality and policing. Before joining CNN in 2020, she worked at The Los Angeles Times as a data and graphics journalist, using interactive and visual storytelling to cover a wide range of subjects such as wildfires, politics and pop culture. She is from California’s Bay Area, and graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism.
Brian Jacobs, National GeographicBrian is a senior graphics editor at National Geographic based in Washington, D.C. He uses code, design and visualization to express science topics to the public through interactive maps and graphics. He was previously a Knight-Mozilla fellow at ProPublica, where he worked with satellite imagery to visualize environmental stories.
Darla Cameron, Texas TribuneDarla leads a team of data developers who work at the intersection of graphics and news applications. She loves to use data to hold public officials accountable and create more transparency in the murky world of state politics. Her team’s work helps readers understand Texas better. Previously, she was a graphics editor at The Washington Post.
News 1
Jane Pong, BloombergJane is a graphics editor at Bloomberg in Hong Kong, where she leads a team that specializes in data-related information graphics. Her work aims to bring beauty to scientific rigor and form to artistic introspection. Jane has previously worked as a data visualization journalist at The Financial Times and South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and Reuters in Singapore.
Rebecca Pazos, The Straits Times
Rebecca is currently working as the interactive graphics correspondent with The Straits Times’ digital graphics team. She has worked in this role for more than five years, steadily building and improving on the visual content produced by ST. Journalist by training and an avid data storytelling enthusiast, she has traversed multiple technologies from coding to AR and VR. She is also currently undertaking a master’s in visual tools run by the University of Girona and organized by Xaquín González Veira, former head of visuals at The Guardian.
Agnes Chang, ProPublicaAs a creative story technologist at ProPublica, Agnes builds interactive visual stories for investigative journalism. Previously, she spent many years at The New York Times on NYT Cooking and NYT Video product teams. More recently, Agnes has served as an adjunct professor of data visualization and augmented reality at Columbia University.
News 2
Martin Frobisher, Tampa Bay Times
An online designer since 2001, Martin was the launch designer of PolitiFact.com and several other Pulitzer-winning projects. He has experience in the newsroom, pre-press, marketing and IT. He started his design career at the Beach Peoples’ Easy Reader in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1975. A couple of newspaper jobs later, he found himself working at the St. Petersburg Times, now the Tampa Bay Times.
Lily Mihalik, PoliticoLily is the managing editor of design and data at Politico. She leads design strategy and implementation across newsroom tools, daily reporting and special projects. She also works with art directors, developers, cross-platform editors and reporters to tell engaging digital stories.
Alexandre Lage, Globoesporte
Alexandre is a digital designer with the sports section of Globoesporte.com and works with special projects and infographics. Previously, he worked for five years as a partner at a design studio, where he developed visual identities, websites and print materials for different sectors. Alexandre earned a industrial and visual design degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has previously been recognized by Society for News Design for his work at Globoesporte.
Product
Tiffany Middleton, FanDuel
Tiffany is from a small town in Alabama where she first discovered her passion for design through her love for sneakers. She has spent the last 10 years designing for companies including, ESPN, The Undefeated, Auburn University, Fan Duel, Green Bay Packers and Panini America. In her free time, she enjoys playing with her puppy, Kobe, cooking new dishes and traveling to new places.
Tony Elkins, USA TodayTony is the director of innovation for Gannett and is based in Austin, Texas. His primary focus is on on the intersection of innovation/product/journalism/tacos. Tony is currently working on VUI and how to reach audiences when there is no longer a visual interface. He is citizen of the Comanche Nation.
Reed Reibstein, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Reed is a design manager and product leader, heading up product design and user research at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was previously director of product design at American City Business Journals and García Media and adjunct assistant professor at Columbia Journalism School, where he assisted and lectured in Mario García’s class on multi-platform design. He’s passionate about outcome- and customer-centric product development, helping teams launch smart, speedy tests to learn if they’re on the right track. He’s obsessed with typography, and he indulges as an annual contributor to Typographica’s “Our Favorite Typefaces.”
Conflict Judges
Alyson Hurt, NPRAlyson currently heads up the news apps team at NPR, which works on graphics, data analysis and special story presentations. Previously, she worked at The Washington Post and The Arizona Republic. She is an alumna of Georgetown University and Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Ryan Murphy, The Los Angeles TimesRyan is a data reporter and developer on The Los Angeles Times data graphics desk. Previously, he worked at The Texas Tribune, a non-profit news organization covering Texas politics, where he was a founding member of the Tribune’s Data Visuals team. His work on the multimedia project, Hell and High Water, documenting the dangers of a powerful hurricane striking the city of Houston, earned a Peabody Award in 2016.
Renate Rognan, NRKRenate is a visual journalist and motion graphic designer at the Norwegian Public Broadcaster, NRK. She has worked on a variety of productions for both TV and online during her 14 years at Norway’s largest news and sports broadcaster. Lately, she has worked primarily on visual storytelling and art direction for web stories and social media.