Bad Future, Better Future

Organization: The New York Times

Date: April 20, 2021

I partnered with The New York Time’s Climate Desk on this incredibly important story and helped translate Julia Rosen’s reporting into an illustrated journey through the causes and outcomes of climate change.

After a painstaking digital storyboarding process, I painted illustrations in bits and pieces, using gouache on watercolor paper, and assembled them into long, seamless scenes in Photoshop.

The files for each section of the story are about 50,000 pixels wide and have 1000+ layers! These high-resolution panoramas were cut up into screen-wide slides in Illustrator and fed into an interactive framework custom-built by Aliza Aufrichtig.

One of the biggest challenges for this story was building a continuous landscape that accommodates text in desktop and mobile configurations. Having the flexibility of movable, digital layers made it possible to edit text while the illustrations were being created.

This digital assembly process also came in handy while making a two-page, poster-style spread for print, which published as part of Science Times Earth Day issue.

Here are a few of my favorite moments from the story.