2012 NPR Election Board
Role: Front-End code, Visual Design
Every election, the NPR war room has large screens that display the incoming election results. These election boards must be clear enough for the live reporters to see states, names, and results at a glance when they are live on the air. In 2012, NPR also made these election results available to the public. It was so much fun to see users tweeting photos of the election board being displayed on TVs or projected on walls during election parties.
2012 President Election Board | 2012 House Election Board | 2012 Senate Election Board
Serving Reporters First
With its primary purpose being for the NPR radio hosts, the election board was designed for functionality. The additional challenge was that the screen proportions of the projections were relatively small, so there needed to be a large amount of information squeezed into a small space.
The hosts needed to be able to clearly see which states were going to Obama, and which were going to Romney, so it was natural to have red and blue represent the two parties.
The typeface, Armata Regular, was chosen after experimenting with many san-serif fonts to see what was condensed enough to fit longer names or states, but blocky enough to still be readable from a distance.