Graphicacy expanded the project’s discovery phase to determine the costs and benefits of a custom-built solution compared to off-the-shelf data engineering services. Ultimately, the team concluded that the most efficient path to exceptional results lay in adapting off-the-shelf solutions. Alongside project management, design and engineering, Graphicacy took on an advisory role, working with The Trace on custom implementations of key tools.
Data Wrapper—an industry standard tool for generating custom charts and displays—allows The Trace staffers to stock the Hub with new datasets, regardless of size, source or format. And Redivis, software that provides cloud-based data analysis, data sharing and user management, allows journalists with little to no coding experience to wrangle complex data structures for the purpose of visualization.
The Graphicacy design team also developed a concise data visualization style guide that extended the visual language of The Trace’s existing WordPress site, designed and built by the Creative Agency Civilization.
The centerpiece of the resulting Data Hub, the Data Library, offers a platform combining simple search and filtering functionality with helpful resources and how-to pages. The Library stores a bevy of hand-curated downloadable datasets on topics like firearm sales, school-adjacent shootings, ghost guns, road-rage shootings and more. Together, its many features provide an unprecedented degree of research clarity—and the most comprehensive publicly accessible data resource on gun violence in the United States.
