sophia dengo

senior visual & interactive designer

journalist & space blogger

amateur jeweler & maker of awesomeness

design archive

all the design work fit to show.

Graphic: rocky bodies

Asteroids, meteors, comets, and meteorites are sometimes used interchangeably. With all the space rocks that seem to be taking aim at Earth lately, it seemed that a graphic explaining the differences among them was called for.

Concept: CSC Mobile

Had a little extra time on my hands and decided to try my hand at taking an out-of-date website and translating the most important information (as I perceived it) onto a mobile app.

I followed best practices for designing on iOS and sized the app for an iPhone 5 height. The purple is dictated by the California Science Center’s existing logo, which was repurposed for the app.

This is still a work in progress, but the app’s home screen seemed like a logical place to start!

Rules of the Internet

One of CNN.com’s writers needed art for his Rules of the Internet story and asked for a simple type treatment of the rules. Originally, the intent was to illustrate each rule, but for the sake of visual clarity the illustrations were eliminated.

Color and font choices were dictated by CNN’s digital style guide and a need for multiple font weights.

Latino in America

Latino in America is a CNN.com franchise that’s run for several years. This graphic was designed and executed at the request of the LIA blog producers, who wished to shed light on the reality of being Latino in America.

Graphic: The Lifecycle of a T-shirt

This graphic ran on CNN.com during NY Fashion Week. It required working closely with both a writer as well as a CNN Library researcher in order to compile the data and select the information that best tells the story, and went through several rounds of revision.

BorderStories

BorderStories was produced by a team of four people over the course of about three months. I was responsible for managing the website, which included creating the Flash shells for the content and the core of the branding.

I also had opportunities to shoot video and translate between English and Spanish.

Haiti: Stories from the Quake

The 2010 Haiti earthquake left a ripple of devastation around the world, but the personal stories that emerged from the devastation were both poignant and inspiring.

This was designed by a teammate, and I built the final product in Flash. It was my responsibility to make sure all the functionality was in place and working properly.

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Haiti: data maps

After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, CNN.com struggled with how to best quickly display the reams of data we had for quakes and aftershocks, relief locations, casualties and damage.

We created these maps by leveraging KML files and the Google Maps for Flash API along with an HTML shell to house them in.

Concept: Water

Produced as a concept for CNN International. The goal was to take disparate sets of data about water and combine them all into an attractive visual element that would stand alone on a page.

Black in America 2: Journeys

In 2009, CNN produced a documentary about what it’s like to be black in America. CNN.com produced this multimedia piece, which talked about the migration of a few families around the United States.

I was responsible for the design (based on a style guide) and the Flash programming of the piece, including the audio, animations and slideshows.