It was recently my privilege to work with documentary photographer Donna de Cesare on her long-form documentary project on gangs and the aftermath of war, "Destiny's Children." Ms. DeCesare started the project in 2003 with Fred Ritchin of PixelPress and graphic designer Zohar Nir-Amitin, but the demands of teaching prevented its completion.
This past winter, I took the assets from the project and adapted them to more modern forms. I coded a custom Flash application to render the interactive elements, and moved the more text-heavy elements to a bilingual Wordpress backend, customized to match the look and feel of the original design.
The Flash application was coded in PureMVC, using SWFAddress to ensure fluid navigation between the Wordpress-based HTML pages and deeplinks in the Flash site. On the Wordpress side, the qTranslate plugin allowed for simple input of bilingual content in both English and Spanish.
A big part of Ms. DeCesare's vision for the site was that it also function as an educational resource and as a resource for communities affected by the issues in the stories. I reflected this vision in the design of the print stylesheet; with a clean layout and permalinks in a footer on the page, simply hitting "print" in the browser yields a well-laid out informaton sheet that would be at home as a handout in a class, or as something a social worker might hand out to a gang-involved youth seeking tattoo removal.