Crisis Guide: The Global Economy

Spend ten minutes looking at Crisis Guide: The Global Economy and it becomes clear why it was the 2009 winner of the Business & Financial Reporting Emmy Award. Not only is it an impressive example of journalism, it also capitalizes on every intrinsic feature unique to Flash. In addition to being a 2D animation tool, Flash is an interactive storytelling tool.  Flash facilitates “step-up-and-engage” interactivity not possible through traditional “sit-back-and-watch” multimedia. With that in mind, the Council on Foreign Relations, in conjunction with MediaStorm, produced this interactive feature to explore how the crisis came about.  Crisis Guide invites users to interact with audio, video, stills, graphs, and charts allows them to dig deep and explore a complex issue.

From a design perspective, the interface is intuitive and well organized. Only after peeling back several layers of information does the user realize the volume of information held in 860 x 548 pixels. Designers disguise this by first breaking the piece into six chapters and then breaking chapters into subchapters. Subchapters contain a myriad of storytelling features. The Timeline section breaks the economic crisis into comprehensive manageable pieces by unifying text and stills into visual, interactive timelines. Another section mixes Google Motion Charts with expert analysis in a manner that allows a high level of user interaction.

Aside from obvious designer critique of color, line, shape and basic usability, which are phenomenal, designers employed two conventions I appreciated from a film perspective: They paced the videos with music and mixed black and white still with color video. Nice attention to detail. Also, they used native languages with subtitles to explain the global impact of the crisis was a risky choice. At cPOY, judges discouraged this. But, here, it may serve to break readers from their US-centric focus.