I was the designer for this story at The Washington Post about Tanner and Shay Martin. Shay was pregnant with their first child while Tanner was dying from stage four colon cancer.
The material for this story was intimate and often devastating, so I took a less-is-more approach, keeping the narrative at the center. I worked with the photo and project editors to pace the photos and videos, offsetting photo grids slightly to mirror a family scrapbook.
I pushed to isolate small, weighty details, like letting the line "the baby was due in 57 days" sit alone, and built a countdown timeline to convey urgency. I also designed the video to interrupt the scroll and take over full-screen, since video often gets skipped and this footage was essential to knowing the family. Jahi Chikwendiu won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for this project.
Read the full story here.
Reporting by Ariana Eunjung Cha, Drea Cornejo and Dan Keating. Video by Drea Cornejo and Julia Wall. Photography by Jahi Chikwendiu. Graphic by Luis Melgar.
Design by Chelsea Conrad. Development by Emily Wright. Additional development by Carson TerBush.
Editing by Lynh Bui, Mary-Ellen Deily and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Stephen Smith, Briana R. Ellison, Martha Murdock, Jordan Melendrez and Meghan Hoyer.
Design editing by Christian Font. Video production by Jessica Koscielniak, Whitney Leaming and Tom LeGro. Photo editing by Maya Valentine. Graphic editing by Manuel Canales.