Client:

class project

About this project

“We are a group of student videographers, web designers and developers, reporters and faculty brought together by a common goal: to share the voices of Cuba’s youth.”

This is an annual project by UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism. In past projects, students have reported across five continents and produced award-winning multimedia work. In 2017, the project was about Cuba. I served as a designer and a front-end developer in the team. I worked with other designers, developers, videographers, and reporters and we produced several wonderful documentaries, informative articles and a website to display all the content.

Click Here to visit the project website 

Challenge

Designing for a big story was very challenging. There were many cross-border cooperations and I had to learn a lot of coding knowledge to help code the website. The website interface and a style guide must be set up before the team going to Cuba, so I had to design with very limited materials and resources.

The whole team went to Cuba for shooting, interviewing and exploring. With no internet in Cuba, I had to take advantage of what I have in hand and really focus on the environment and seriously think of the theme.

I designed the logo, an interactive piece, a story page, and the about page. I overturned my designs for several times in order to better match the overall style of the website and sometimes I had to abandon my favorite ideas for the website to be more unified.

Solutions

Always learning, being humble and staying creative–this is my key of teamwork in this project.

I joined videographers during their shooting progress in Cuba to get immersed into the environment and understand the subject better. I woke up before sunrise to prepare for notes and interview questions; visited the video characters according to their schedule, trying to get as much design resource as I can without disturbing the filming or overwhelming the character; sketched the ideas for infographics and organized the general information in the afternoon; met with reporters and other designers to check the progress and exchange ideas after dinner; stayed up until 2 am. to craft the design and help with coding.

Once the team returned, we spent hours working together in class and had evening lock-ins where we worked until the early hours of the morning. There were a lot of revises and a lot of last minute changes.

The project was successfully premiered in April.

The result

Cuba’s New Wave won the first place for the David Teeuwen Student Journalism Award for its use of innovative digital storytelling. The award is part of the Online Journalism Awards.

https://awards.journalists.org/winners/2017/

Capabilities involved

teamwork, research, writing, interview

HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Experience Design