A good sports graphic doesn’t require rocket science

One of our journalism students, Ryan Moulton, is largely self-taught in Flash, although he’s now learning more about it in a course taught by one of our grad students, Dave Stanton.

Here’s the team graphic Ryan put up on the student daily newspaper site, in time for the University of Florida varsity baseball season opener: Baseball Lineup 2008.

I think the field diagram (on the left side) could provide a bit more feedback when I roll over the player positions, but overall I’m impressed by the clarity, ease of use, and fast loading of this graphic. Our students are working with a very unfriendly CMS, so it’s always quite an achievement when they manage to beat it into submission to allow them to post graphic work like this.

Ryan was ably assisted by another student journalist, the alligatorSports.org editor, Evan Drexler.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23, 2008, at 9:45 am and is filed under Flash, design, graphics, interactive, journalism, multimedia, reporting, sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 responses to “A good sports graphic doesn’t require rocket science”

Ryan writes:

Thanks for the shoutout! However, it looks like the CMS switched up the links on you. The package can be found at http://www.alligator.org/sports/packages/080222baseball/ and the graphic can be found at it’s own page at http://www.alligator.org/articles/2008/02/22/sports/sports_multimedia/baseball.txt.
February 23, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Mindy writes:

I didn’t realize there were two options — I like the one you call the package, with the up-to-date headlines below it.

Do you have data feeding this, or is it manual?
February 23, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Tim Holmes writes:

Once I found the right URL, I liked the graphic. One of the best Flash stories I have seen was a sports report highlighting a particular move in a basketball game. It was put together by a student at a college in Seville, Spain (CEADE, if you’re interested: http://www.ceade.es/) who had been taught by a a Flash disciple. This was three or four years ago, so at least some places were ahead of the curve, even if the mainstream journalism colleges have taken a while to catch up.
February 25, 2008 at 9:03 am
Mindy writes:

Sorry about that, Tim — I fixed the URL. (Damn that lousy CMS!)

The schools in Spain produce the best infographic artists in the world. Alberto Cairo, Rafa Höhr and Xaquin Gonzalez Veira are among the greatest at designing animated news graphics.
February 25, 2008 at 9:22 am
Web Design Zoo writes:

Thanks for this!
August 30, 2008 at 8:08 am