Yahoo News 2022 Midterm Elections
The Ask: Immediately following the formation of the News Visuals team in mid-2022, we noticed a surprising lack of strategy and packaging around that year’s midterm elections, sure to be a major tentpole and ongoing story. As way of introducing ourselves and capabilities to our new editorial and cross-functional partners, we created a custom article template for midterms-related stories with improved visual widgets and interactivity. We also created a style guide for illustration and photo treatments, infographics, an article hub in the existing Yahoo product style, and template suites for for social media and video graphics.
Role: Creative direction, design
The Outcome:
• Though existing product and SEO limitations prevented the article template from being utilized, the video toolkit and social media templates were immediately deployed, with a pronounced boost in clicks and engagement especially on election night.
• The package was extremely well received overall, and made a great first impression for the new team. It also led to our team having a larger role in redeveloping article templates and visuals for exploratory homepage redesign efforts.
Though ultimately more of a spec project, the social and video templates significantly boosted election night engagement, and the custom product led to greater cross-functional R&D opportunities for the new team
Credits
Ted McGrath: Creative Director
Caitlin Murray: Art Direction, Design
Joe Riccobono: Animation, Design
Kyle McCauley: Additional Animation