Newsy.com

Innovation in journalism happens at places like Newsy.com.

In 2010, I helped design their iPad app (which went on to win Best in Show among mobile news apps at the W3 awards), but my real contribution was redesigning the motion graphics of their core product: mobile video news.

Newsy’s mission is to offer multiple, global perspectives from various media organizations on hot stories and package them in 1-4 minute videos. So an early revelation for me that drove the redesign was the challenge of making Newsy’s idea of multiple perspectives from a content standpoint match the idea of multiple perspectives from a design standpoint. I put a lot of elements at varying depths and focal places to provide visual perspective and used video and images I felt had strong journalistic value that would invoke an immediate feel: such as wartime footage, disasters, and influential people

The other main design concept revolved around implementing a modern, tech-savvy, Internet sort of feel, to match Newsy’s multi-faceted distribution, which includes Youtube, Itunes, Podcasts, Android, iOS app and television to name a few.

The redesign, which took about six months, incorporated most everything I know about motion graphic design: extensive keyframing of motion effects, 3D animation, masks, splines, behaviors, sequence text behaviors, alpha channels, composite modes, filters and other visual effects. In some cases, like the end graphic, I was working in hundreds of layers of videos, text, images, masks, objects and more, so organization was key.

What emerged was a brighter, faster-paced design that has become an integral part of Newsy’s accelerating growth. Newsy is now a multi-million dollar company that continues to innovate and reach ambitious goals and my stamp is on their core product every day.