The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic

Muito bom o making of do The New York Times sobre como a equipe do jornal projeta seus infográficos na web. (via SND). 

Overview by Kevin Quealy 

• First is the data itself

• Matthew Bloch´s mapping framework is higly optimized

• In the end, graphics director Steve Duenes and deputy Matt Ericson came up with a sketch based on elements of my previous mockups:

• which I turned into a more refined Illustrator mockup:

• We needed to get all the movie thumbnail images, the Metacritic ‘Metascores’, the links to The Times’ reviews and the first few sentences of the reviews themselves. We did this mostly by writing scripts. Both Metacritic and Netflix have great search-engine optimization, so just Googling a film title with the word ‘Netflix’ or ‘Metacritic’ generally gives you what you want in the first search entry:

• The result was the graphic that’s online now. We were able to get a lot in, but we still had to leave a lot out, such as different ways to shade the maps other than by movie (i.e. where people rented movies that were nominated for Best Picture or shading each ZIP code based on a calculation of the Metacritic ratings for its top 50 movies, which we did in print for the New York region), but it would have made the interface even more complicated.