May 10, 2019

In 2018, the DNC had a complicated set of rules for selecting which candidates out of a wide field would actually take the stage at the debate. My challenge was to show who had made the cut quickly and easily, and to help readers keep track of the candidates, many of whom were not household names.

I focused the graphic on a broad expression of the main criteria for the debate: individual donors and polling. The blue box highlights values that meet the criteria, so readers can tell at a glance who has qualified. I also include the actual value of unique donors as a point of interest. The details of the rules are handled in the deck head and the rest of the article.

To help readers with the who’s who I used head shots, but not before doing some serious retouching.

For many months as the 2020 race ramped up at CNN we made do with a set of mismatched photos rather than true head shots. To include them all on such an angular, graphic and brilliantly blue chart I needed to bring some consistency. High-contrast black and white bought a lot of uniformity across the set and really helped make the people identifiable and gave the graphic some interest.

This new set of photos turned out to have pretty good legs.

The Colbert Show used a bar chart I made with the same set of heads on a July 2019 quarterly fund raising segment. The graphic above was included in an explainer on the debates for CNN’s social channels.