My design work was recognized twice by the California News Publishers Association at this year’s California Journalism Awards for work done in 2020. I placed fourth in the “Home Page Layout & Design” category and fifth in the “Story Presentation, Page Layout & Design” category for the design and page layout of Education During Covid: California Families Struggle to Learn.

The award for homepage design is particularly gratifying, as a major redesign of the homepage was my big design project of the first half of 2020 and reflected shifting needs in the organization to keep up with breaking news covering the coronavirus pandemic, as well as long-standing desires to better surface multimedia and content from special reporting packages. The ranking comes after Capital & Main, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Voice of OC in first, second and third places – all of whom are either larger than EdSource in traffic or staff, or (as far as I can tell) work with external design expertise rather than rely on an in-house web designer and web developer as EdSource does.

The story presentation and layout award was for sites with comparable traffic (under 400k monthly unique visitors) and came after Long Beach Post in the top three positions and California Health Report in fourth. The layout challenge here was to accommodate the stories of more than a dozen families in an intuitive and easy to navigate layout, which each entry in the series revisited (part one). I’m glad that the design seems to have delivered on a project that took enormous effort from the EdSource reporters who contacted and kept up with families across the state as they managed with digital learning and other challenges catalyzed by the coronavirus.