A consortium of news graphics producers working on Olympics coverage gets a guernsey at the World Editors Forum in Kiev.
Some of the best coverage of London 2012 will be on display in a special session at the Kiev event, September 2-5, when Adonis Durado, design director for Oman’s Muscat Press, tells of the worldwide consortium set up to pool graphics during the Olympics.
Instead of facing off as rivals, ten news publications’ design departments decided to approach the Olympics as a team. Hence the ‘graphics consortium’, an informal agreement among infographic gurus from ‘Le Monde’, the ‘Boston Globe’, ‘La Nación’ and others to freely share and cross-publish each other’s Olympic graphics.
“We are now in the age of sharing information,” says Durado (pictured), whose team has already contributed five graphics to the consortium.
He says building graphics is labour-intensive. It took his team three weeks to research and construct a ring-shaped visualisation on the history of the Olympic medallion, and their spread on Muslim athletes competing during the fast of Ramadan took a fortnight.
“These kinds of events make the graphics department frenzied and more chaotic,” Durado says, but they are also an occasion for experimentation. “Newsrooms will give you space; you can do whatever you want,” he says. “It’s exciting."
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