Talk to The Graphics Director of The New York Times

By Mark Kaufman

Want to know something about how the Old Grey Lady creates graphics? This week you can ask a question of Steve Duenes, the Graphics Director of The New York Times. This seems to me to be a rare chance to find out something you’ve been dying to know about charts, diagrams, maps, tables and the like. I think it’s an awesome opportunity, for the first time they have presented a chance to ask questions of someone in the creative department. Here are the questions I asked this morning:

1. What is the normal timeline to create a chart. I assume for a breaking news story it is relatively quick, for a longer feature story I am assuming that the timeline is somewhat longer. A few days? A week?

2. Does the graphics staff have a style guide like the editorial staff? By that I mean, do you have a code of ethics to guide you  when making charts and diagrams? Since numbers don’t lie, but charts often do, how much effort goes in to making a chart not only clear and easy to understand, but fair and objective?

3. Does the graphic staff do field work or does all of the research, design and production go on in the Times’ offices?

4. How much experimenting do you do in creating new and innovative ways of dissecting information and creating a graphic interpretation? How long do those experiments go on, and does your staff have regular editorial and critique meeting to discuss the work.

5. Lastly, how closely does the graphic staff work with a writer on a particular story? I would think there would be a working relationship between writers, and designers in the business, science, technology and opinion pages, maybe less so or not at all in the news sections.