Clare Lynne Ramirez

Canary: The Washington Post Investigates

My role for Canary, The Washington Post’s first long-form investigative podcast was to design the landing page. In doing so, I hoped to mimic the powerful narrative and tone of the podcast itself. For this project, I was able to listen to the entirety of the podcast before its release.

One priority was making sure readers knew they were looking at an audio-first project. My design solution involved (1) incorporating a fixed navigation bar at the top of the page to highlight our three biggest partners: Apple Music, Spotify, and Stitcher; (2) giving the readers the opportunity to listen to the podcast and read their transcripts after the initial title scroll; and (3) placing "subscribe" buttons at the end of the page that link to different platforms where you can listen to the podcast.

I also wanted to incorporate short clips of the podcast on the page, so readers could preview what they'll hear in the full-length episodes. In pairing the women's voices with their portraits, my hope was that it would give a different but just as powerful effect that readers would get as if they were listening to the actual podcast. It was also an intentional decision to use audio clips of only the women.

This project was recognized with an Award of Excellence for story page design at SND's Best of Digital Design competition. 

You can read more about the process here. 

The Lost Local News Issue

In 2021, Washington Post Magazine published The Lost Local News Issue — the largest in the history of the Magazine — showing the impact of losing local journalism. My role in this project involved project managing, art direction, print design, and digital design. 

For this issue, we asked local journalists to tell severely underreported or entirely untold stories in places without a local newspaper. I collaborated with a developer on our team to come up with a digital landing page to showcase the pieces from the issue, incorporating visuals from each one. I came up with the CSS styling to make sure all the published pieces looked consistent, and came up with a custom setup of relinking the stories to each other. On the art direction side, I also recruited four artists to produce standalone illustrations, which were sprinkled throughout the landing page.

In the months leading up to production, I worked with the magazine staff to set deadlines for photo, copy, and illustration. This allowed me to manage my own time as I was able to design most of the print spreads and digital pieces, as well as delegate other work to my fellow designers. I also was in charge of booking the magazine and developing with stylized treatments for the opener spreads for features. 

You can read more about the process here.