With SND 45 in the books, board member Martina Ibáñez-Baldor set out to ask this year’s winners about their portfolios and tips for the rest of us. Anna Boone, Digital Designer at The Star Tribune, was a finalist for World’s Best Designer in the SND 45 digital competition.
What is your current job title, and how long have you been in that role?
I am a digital designer at the Star Tribune, where I’ve worked since I moved up north for an internship in the summer of 2017 after I graduated from Indiana University.
What do you love about designing for digital?
The exciting and sometimes overwhelming feeling that there is so much more to learn might be my favorite thing. There’s always another coding language to explore, new libraries to use, and just generally a lot of ways to create something. I like knowing that there’s a lot I don’t know. It helps me break out of creative blocks and learn something new.
It’s not a static medium — people are viewing your work on a variety of devices and sizes and orientations. That can obviously be stressful, but it also makes you think through a design in different ways.
Which of these project was the most challenging?
The most challenging project of my portfolio this year was our investigative story on the death of Heather Mayer. Heather was a single mom who became involved with a man named Ehsan Karam through the BDSM scene in the Twin Cities. The police ruled Heather’s death a suicide, but her mom set out to find the truth.
Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix had been reporting this story for over a year when the designers were brought into help with the production. Most of the time, one of the hardest parts for design is finding the right assets to help tell the story. In this case, it was the opposite — we were flooded with so many pieces that seemed like they would add to the narrative. There was body camera footage from police, text messages between Heather and Ehsan, and Heather and her mother, court documents, police reports, interview videos with Ehsan’s other victims, portrait and documentary photography from staff photographer Renee Jones Schneider, social media posts from Heather and Ehsan, and provided photos — many of which were extremely graphic depictions of the violence victims like Heather had endured.
I worked closely with Josh Jones, the print designer for this project, throughout the visual editing process. We took great care to select visual assets that added to the story and did not sensationalize or make the story seem salacious. We worked hard to find a balance of supporting the story and adding in pieces of interest but also letting the narrative have room to breathe and to make sure we weren’t interrupting the flow.
Due to the sensitive nature of the provided photos, I provided options for the user so they had control over their reading experience and could adjust and hide graphic content as they wished. We also allowed them to control the volume, but provided automatic closed captions on every video so that it could be read without sound while not losing the context of the videos.
It was a heavy topic for everyone involved, and seeing the graphic images — many of which we did not choose to publish — throughout the time we were working on this piece was draining. The appreciation from readers and from people who knew Heather made all the hard moments worthwhile, but it was definitely the most challenging piece I worked on last year for all these reasons.
As a result of this story, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension – Minnesota’s state investigative agency – reopened Heather’s case.
What is your favorite piece in your portfolio from this year?
My favorite piece from this year is “10 years, 10 couples.” It was the next bigger project I worked on after Heather’s story, so it was a good chance to catch my breath and enjoy a features story. The piece, which was published to mark 10 years of same-sex marriage in Minnesota, profiles 10 different couples and what their lives look like now.
We had great videography and photography for this project, so it was really just a chance for me to sit back and play the visuals in a big and engaging way. I love the top of the story, which we call the hero, most of all. The video clips of each couple provide such a great little look at the personality of each couple. I tried to clip them in a way where there is a little “break” — a head falling onto a shoulder, a look down to the cat, a kiss on the cheek, a shared laugh. I think those little pieces are what help video portraits stand out, and offer little moments of humanity and dimension.
What advice would you give to designers who are looking to improve their portfolios?
Raise your hand often! Most of the pieces in my portfolio that I’m most proud of are pieces that I have asked to help with, whether I’m personally invested in the subject or I think the story has really good visual potential and the chance to break out of our typical story structure. A piece from this year that I volunteered for was our educated guess at what surprise songs Taylor Swift would play at the Minneapolis Eras Tour dates, pitched and reported by our director of graphics C.J. Sinner. There’s not many other opportunities I think I’ll get to do a 10-color gradient background (in chronological era order, of course). We also added some easter eggs in true Taylor fashion, color coding our lyric references and coordinating era-appropriate emoji hovers for each.
Also, don’t be afraid to go back and start over. One of the pieces in my portfolio, the Holiday Cookie Finder, is a database I worked on with our newsroom developer Tom Nehil. I worked on it a few years ago and helped redesign it, but was never fully satisfied with where it ended up. It was functional, and clean, but I didn’t think it felt as special as the database is — this is our collection of more than 100 reader-submitted cookie recipes. It is rich and delicious content (sorry). I ran out of time back then and just had to finish up, and then every year would update it in November with new recipes and get the nagging feeling it was something that should be updated stylistically, too. Last year, Tom reached out to me early in the summer to say he thought it was time to redo the database code, and it was the push I needed. We were able to wireframe, and try different things, and had enough time to add fun features like the “Find your perfect cookie” quiz. I’m so happy with it now and it became one of my favorite pieces I worked on last year. It’s also in a better state to continue to iterate in the future as we continue update the database yearly.
I always wish I had more time for creative coding projects, but after spending all day on my computer I find it hard to keep working on digital personal projects after I log off. I’ve stopped beating myself up for this, and I do things that still feed my creativity, like printmaking and knitting, while also giving me a break from the screen. I think that taking that space has helped my portfolio, too, because now my ideas I want to try outside of work I instead try to implement into different stories (as long as they are appropriate for the subject matter). I think doing anything to help keep your creativity flowing, even if it’s not directly related to your work, will have benefits that show up in surprising ways.