digital storytelling

Space Week

News@Northeastern •  07/15/19–07/19/19

roles: design, writing, research, illustration, web & WordPress development.

Saturday, July 20, 2019, marked the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. This five-part series commemorated that achievement and highlighted Northeastern’s role in space exploration. We also were able to leverage the Boston Globe Photography Collection currently newly acquired by Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections.

As there was a plethora of visual material, my team had to come up with a way to display this material in a compact form that would work across devices yet still give room for explanatory text and historical context. While we varied the concept throughout the week (the actual moon landing day feature revolved around only five large photos), we went with a series of layers and photo reels that could overlap and run in place to pack as much of the archival material in as possible. Leveraging parallax/Green Sock methods, we built a shifting stream of photography, text, audio, and video that scrolled by as the reader took in the narrative of the history of space exploration. Users were free to engage with additional content as little or as much as they wanted, and smaller “sidebars” with video were employed for those that wanted to deep-dive.