Following the passage of a bill that would allow extradition to mainland China in June 2019, a typically peaceful Hong Kong became the setting of massive pro-democracy protests. Plumes of smoke and tear gas obfuscated neon lights. Police clad in paramilitary gear clashed with protestors in T-shirts, shorts, and makeshift protective gear. The effect was a series of remarkable contrasts. “It was a story made to be told visually,” says Darren Long, head of graphics and magazine design for the South China Morning Post. And yet it was unlike any story his team had told before.
That story, the constant barrage of breaking news, also changed how Long’s team approached news coverage. SCMP’s visual coverage of the Hong Kong protests was incredibly robust, ranging from explainer infographics to in-depth timelines. But when you look at the scope of the SCMP’s graphics as a whole, they offer a big-picture view of the historic protests—and were only possible because the team adopted new ways of working and was able to pivot on the fly. It’s this groundbreaking coverage that won our Innovation by Design Award for Graphic Design.
Initially, they spent time on the ground, but Long says the time it took for his team to cover the events with infographics—creating illustrations, charts, and graphs, and writing code for digital animations—meant that “events kept on running away from us . . . We were constantly playing catch-up.” Long decided to shift their tactic to look 90 days ahead. The team plotted important data along the way, almost like chapters in a larger story, so when 90 days hit they could give a thorough wrap-up of what happened. In doing so, Long says his team embraced the chaos, and rather than trying to produce graphics that encompassed each day’s breaking news, they were able to build out focused and incredibly in-depth retrospective visual analyses over months.
