Since then, we've grown and changed our routines, and now we don't really think of ourselves as a print graphics department. We think of ourselves as a desk that can produce graphics for whichever platform makes sense. Here are some of the results:

 An interactive piece assessing the "surge" in Baghdad.

 A look at Barry Bonds's home run record.

 A critique of the New York Times tower.

In this endeavor, we're not alone. Developing deep interactive features often means joining hands with a couple of other departments whose staff members have extensive specialized skills. One new group in the newsroom, the interactive news technology department, is a group of talented software developers who sit nearby and focus their efforts on projects that require significant programming expertise. Two recent collaborative projects with this group were our guide to where presidential candidates stand on the issues and our election results pages.

On other kinds of projects, we get together with the multimedia department. Andrew Devigal manages the group, and I asked him if he could talk a little bit about what they do. Here's Andrew:

The multimedia department, like graphics, has staff members with a variety of experience that ranges from advanced degrees in computer science to several years' worth of work in public radio. By collaborating with many departments in the newsroom, especially the graphics department, we've been able to produce media-rich narratives and experiences. For example, Gabriel Dance worked with the graphics and video departments to produce The Met's New Greek and Roman Galleries. The package offers an immersive experience that includes photographic panoramas and a tour of the galleries with Michael Kimmelman, a Times art critic. Our department also develops tools to help readers visualize complex sets of information. Senior multimedia producer Tom Jackson collaborated with Archie Tse to design the "Is It Better to Buy or Rent?" interactive.

Guidelines for Visual Communication

Q. Could you summarize what you consider the most important guidelines in effective visual communication? And could you provide us a gallery of diagrams/maps/charts that illustrate your guidelines?

 Dick Purcell, Boulder, Colo.

A. I mentioned earlier that I'd try to assemble a list of New York Times graphics that we're mostly happy with. I say mostly because we haven't created any perfect graphics, but this assemblage represents many of the strengths of the department. To gather the list, I asked my colleagues in the department (and other departments) to contribute graphics they liked as well as a description of the process. Here goes:

Erin Aigner, a graphics editor and cartographer, talks about an interactive trip up Mt. Kilimanjaro:

For our animation of Tom Bissell's climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro, we wanted to give the reader a panoramic view of the mountain and a sense of the scale of his weeklong journey. To make an accurate model of the mountain, I used digital elevation data to create a 3-D model. Then I traced the climbers' route onto a satellite image of the mountain, which I draped over the model so that the different types of land cover looked realistic. After the model was created, I used software that allows you to control environmental elements like light and clouds to create a fly-though movie. My colleague, Vu Nguyen, designed the interface and integrated all the elements in Flash.

Jonathan Corum, science graphics editor, describes his graphic (print version and Web version) covering the presidential debates:

One recent example of a graphic that used a range of tools as part of the creative process was the "String of Debates" graphic, part of which was expanded online as the "Naming Names" interactive feature. The graphic showed word usage among major presidential candidates across a series of debates, and used a set of circles to indicate when candidates spoke the last name of another candidate.

Work on the project ranged from extremely tedious (hours of scripting and combing through debate transcripts to separate the different candidates) to extremely interesting (learning a new software package to produce the desired chart).

The circle design was created with an impressive piece of software called Circos, which was originally built to visualize genomic data. To make it work I had to encode the entire series of debates as if it was a genome. So each presidential candidate was a chromosome, and each debate was a chromosome band, and each spoken word was a nucleotide. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but that was all behind the scenes. The end result is a fairly simple interactive graphic, but hopefully one that caught the eye and allowed readers to find patterns across the long series of debates.

Amanda Cox, a graphics editor, describes interactive graphics she worked on that show box office revenues and the price of oil:

Two of my favorite graphics so far this year involve borrowing visual forms. The first shows the box office revenue and timing of individual films. In preparation for the Oscars a year ago, I did a quick Google Scholar search, and one thread was about how more people go to see films that are nominated for awards. I gathered enough data so we could look at this empirically, but we ended up pursuing a different idea and I moved the box office data to an "ideas" folder in the depths of my computer. A few weeks ago, I met Lee Byron, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, and he showed me work that he had done using a somewhat novel form to look at his personal music listenening history. It seemed like a fun way to go this year, especially online, where we were able to let readers discover patterns about films they had seen since the late 1980's.

The other graphic looks at oil prices and consumption in a way that's a little odd, but also very informative. I had seen a chart like this in an oil industry journal from the 1980's, and also in a publication by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy research group. I thought it was brilliant, but the tricky part for us was making it accessible for a broader audience. Jad Mouawad, a business reporter who covers the energy industry, graciously helped out with the audio tour.

Gabriel Dance, a senior producer in the multimedia department, describes his development of a piece that displays the photos of the American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq:

"Faces of the Dead" was a design challenge on several fronts. The interface needed to be simple, but readers needed to be able see the faces, and they needed to be able to search for individual soldiers, either by name or location. On top of that, I really wanted to encourage readers to stay with the piece for a few minutes, so they could fully absorb both the images and the detailed information.

I went through several revisions and felt it was important that the faces and a count of the total number of casualties be present on the screen at the same time, and it was difficult to determine how to do that. While working on the project, I picked up a design magazine for inspiration, and I saw an illustration with a scantron sheet  like the ones we filled out in grade school for standardized tests  that had an image of a face made up of the little, filled-in bubbles. Something clicked. The scantron bubbles turned into pixels, and each pixel would represent one soldier. This made it possible to get all 3,000 soldiers on the screen at one time. It also made it possible for people to see a new image simply by clicking on any pixel, which encouraged further interaction.

Shan Carter, a graphics editor and interactive designer, talks about how breaking news graphics come together:

Producing in-depth, explanatory graphics in response to breaking news is nearly impossible for one person. When news breaks, our entire team comes together, and each person focuses on one aspect of the graphic. Six people are credited for the crash graphic. Some are reporters who can track down floorplans or talk to witnesses; others are skilled illustrators who can accurately render an entire building in a few hours; my job is usually to bring all the information and illustrations together into an animated narrative for the Web.

Matthew Ericson, the deputy graphics director, talks about a graphic that sorts out court rulings on detainee cases:

It's not the sexiest graphic, but one of my favorite graphics from 2006 was a large timeline we did when the Supreme Court ruled for the fourth time on the issue of Guantánamo Bay detainees. The four cases had a pretty long legal history, with cases filed, and appeals filed, and more appeals filed. I had a hard time keeping the cases straight myself, so I figured there had to be a few readers out there who were confused. Farhana Hossain, our graphics editor in the Washington bureau, started researching the history of the cases and compiling a chronology not only of court decisions in the cases, but also of actions the Bush administration had taken in response to them. The court announced the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision the next day, and we quickly began sketching out how we wanted to arrange the graphic. Over the course of the day, we edited the text to fit the space available, filled in some missing pieces of information, ran it by our terrific legal correspondents, and we had it on the page by about 9 p.m., in time for our first edition.

Dylan McClain, a business graphics editor, on a two-page print graphic describing the declining dollar, in 1995:

The basic idea was pretty straightforward, but producing the graphic itself was difficult. The data was captured on a Friday evening, and then I went in early Sunday morning to begin plotting it. I had to sift through each and every data point (there were more than 2,000 for both the mark and the yen) and space them out according to when each trade occurred. It took me the entire day. The other charts had already been produced and put onto the pages. I recall that I finished up the mark and yen charts about an hour before deadline. Now, of course, it would be much easier.

Amy Schoenfeld, a business graphics editor describes a feature about Super Bowl advertising:

With several weeks to go before the 2007 Super Bowl, we started thinking  has anyone kept track of Super Bowl ads over the years? We found a research group that had and used their historical database to look at trends. Did Budweiser really advertise every year? Was humor always a strategy? We plotted and re-plotted the charts for the print version, but felt they lacked what we were most excited about  the actual ads. So we set up the page like a playbook, organizing strategies on either side of the main chart to highlight some of the most popular and unusual ads. For the Web version, we used the charts to link to the actual commercials. We collected these from ad agencies over a couple of weeks (the research group had the ads only on VHS tapes). We set up the interactive with a timeline slider that allowed users to scroll through two decades of data and ads. This design allows us to update the project each year.

Archie Tse, a senior graphics editor, talks about a print graphic he researched while he was in Iraq:

I was interviewing a Sunni family in their Baghdad apartment when Saddam Hussein's capture was announced on the television. Almost immediately the sound of gunfire erupted across the city as Iraqis reacted to the news. I went to the Green Zone to cover the news conference where they provided details on how Saddam had been found.

That evening, we found out that the military would give a tour of the site to the press the next morning. So after just a couple of hours of sleep, five members of the Times Baghdad bureau, two reporters, a photographer, a translator and I woke up early to make the drive to a military base in Tikrit. From there, we were flown in helicopters to Ad-Dawr, a small village along the Tigris. We walked a short distance to a farmer's shack. The spider hole was off to the side of the courtyard in front of the shack.

I paced out the dimensions of the courtyard and the interior of the shack and made numerous sketches of the spatial relationships between the structures. They let each of us go down into the spider hole. The layout of the hole, which I thought was one of the most important details, was more like a "T" than an "L." I transmitted my sketches back to the graphics department in New York, where two of my colleagues created a 3-D diagram of the compound for the next day's paper.

Joe Ward, sports graphics editor, talks about his analysis of the technique employed by the United States sprinter Lauren Williams:

One of the things I find most satisfying about sports graphics is the opportunity to dissect seemingly simple athletic movements. Lauren Williams is simply running 100 meters. But when her stride, her pace, her body angle and her leg angles are all broken down by the scientists who study them, the difference between these athletes and the rest of us becomes really clear.

Karl Russell, a business graphics editor, talks about a 12-column, print graphic about two days of global market turmoil:

Early in the day we had a meeting, and the news justified going big. We decided to show market performance in 10 countries and have the charts stretch across two pages. We wanted to chart intra-day stock movement (which would walk readers through the events minute by minute) and a long-term trend for context. Also, since we work closely with photo editors, we knew there were lots of good pictures of trading floors, a perfect fit. This graphic was a group effort  a team of four people downloaded data, created charts, reported the descriptions and chose photos. I was responsible for the overall composition.

Mika Gröndahl, a graphics editor and illustrator, talks about his diagram of a centrifuge for the print version of Science Times: