| Our Creative Director Tells All Hello Highliners,
Never in all my years as a designer have I actively hid a project from my husband. We sit around the dinner table, I show him layouts, he tells me which parts sing, which parts don't and nine times out of ten, he makes my work better. What can I say? I picked a man with a good eye. But for our big millennials story, I had to go dark. The work was so terrifyingly weird and outside of my comfort zone that I didn't want anyone, even him, to talk me out of it.
So, needless to say, I've got a lot of pent-up thoughts and feelings! And now that we've published the article and so many people have written me to ask how it got made, I figured I'd try to explain the process, which began about six months and a few too many grey hairs ago. When I first heard about the piece, the challenge was obvious. This was to be a dense macroeconomic treatise without a central character or driving narrative. A designer's dream! At the same time, my editors here—Rachel Morris and Greg Veis—knew they wanted this to be our big blowout project of the year. It had to be an ambitious visual experience, one that made the difficult subject matter accessible. It had to appeal to millennials without pandering to them, and it had to be swimming in black humor. (We used the word "mordant" more than we should have.)
The problem was that we—the three of us and Gladeye, our design and development partners in Auckland—had no idea what it would look like. So the first step, with just the sketchiest of outlines in hand, was finding inspiration. We had a vague sense that we should include an odyssey in the design. Greg suggested that we think of the journey taking place on something like the Rainbow Road from Mario Kart, and that put us in the mindset that we could have millennial characters working their way through a hellscape of mounting fiscal insolvency. This led us to look at a lot of pixel animation and gaming inspiration, and we settled on the idea of starting the story with multiple characters a user could choose to "play" throughout the piece.  Gladeye's senior developer Pablo Espinosa, who is an actual millennial (unlike us oldsters at Highline), picked up what we were putting down. He made us these pixel characters to play with: And he sketched out different scenarios our characters could find themselves in. I can't overstate how many great ideas Pablo had, but one early gem that we filed away as brilliant was this—a demonic Boomer shooting lasers out of her eyes: We talked and talked and talked about what kind of pixel animation we wanted. There was so much out there! But the single piece that informed me the most was the video for Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet." I must've watched it 100 times. I just couldn't believe how they could infuse an 8-bit pixel character with so much whimsy and life. (It's a good song, too!) For fun, I made pixel versions of our Highline staff. (That's me on the right.) And I was obsessed with using monolithic-looking type for some of the text's hair-raising statistics about poverty and retirement non-savings.  At this point, about a month into the process, we had so much inspiration and so little idea of how to put it all together. We really liked the notion of having the reader choose from a slate of characters at the beginning of the piece, but Gladeye told us that it would be too technically difficult to have users choose their own characters to follow. So then we started thinking about using one character to add a whole new emotional layer to the piece. The problem was, we didn't really know what that character would do, besides fall down a lot and get crushed by avocados. (Rachel was intent on that.) Should there be moments where you actually get to play a game with that character? Or would that totally detract from the main essay by Michael Hobbes? Would readers feel sympathy for this little animated millennial, or just annoyed by her? Was the whole concept irredeemably corny? Had we lost our minds, driven mad by the blinking pixels? We started to lose faith. We thought we had spent weeks chasing an idea that just couldn't be caught. On a dark Tuesday evening—after probably the worst day in Highline history, when we just couldn't agree on anything or see any viable way forward—we decided to scrap the video game idea altogether. It was back to the drawing board.I have experienced moments of panic as a designer before, but this one was particularly acute. So, I decided to work from home for a few days. I disappeared into my attic, played Beyoncé's "Lemonade" on repeat and promised myself that I wouldn't come out (except for food, of course) until I had a solution. After much struggle, I came up with a visual environment for a single character (who would later be given the name "Becky," in an homage to my muse Beyoncé) to navigate and sent it to Rachel and Greg. They loved it. We finally had a layout, not just a collection of disparate ideas.  I wish I could say that it was as easy as an avocado rolling down a hill after that, but it was only just the beginning of a several month's long process of honing. There were an infinite number of decisions to be made about each element. We needed to write Becky's dialogue, we needed to design the graphs, we needed to come up with the chapter headers (Jason Wong did an unbelievable job with those), we needed to figure out a way to justify a "boss battle" between a nasty Boomer and poor little Becky. We even debated about the type of glasses the Boomer should wear for it. The long explanation in the piece of why housing got so expensive probably took a month in itself. We scrapped early designs of what the city should look like and kept tinkering with the experience so that the bells and whistles would never lose the reader. The mantra was to be innovative without being intrusive. By the end, our cemetery of discarded ideas got to be So Big. For instance, we wanted to create a Facebook Messenger bot so that a reader could continue to interact with Becky after the piece. Nope. My great sadness is that I didn't get to scatter weather reports throughout the layout. But, as a compromise, Rachel and Greg promised that I could put one of them in a newsletter some day. So here it is:  I could go on, but you likely have holiday cookies to eat and hangovers to nurse, so I'd like to leave you with this: Every single person who worked on this contributed ideas that elevated the final product. And it was totally agnostic—it didn't matter if you were art or edit, designer or developer or writer. Each element in the piece represents a different person's sensibility, and yet somehow it still feels cohesive. The team really gelled. And in case you missed it: Gladeye is based in Auckland, New Zealand. I've never met most of the people I worked with on this project and yet the satisfaction of this collaboration is so complete that it brings a tear to my eye each time I think about it. It took a village. A tiny global village. And that's the beauty of journalism on the Internet. Highline combines the rigor, depth and obsessiveness of the best magazine journalism with the experimentation that becomes possible when no paper or staples are involved. And our goal is simple: We want to publish stories that stay with you.Did you like reading this email? Forward it to a friend. Or sign up! Can't get enough? Check out our Morning Email or Must Reads. ©2017 HuffPost | 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003
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