Designing HuffPollstrology: Astrology & Politics Arianna-Style for the 2008 Presidential Elections
After 2008′s historical Super Tuesday, where it was still unclear if Obama or Clinton would be the dem candidate (and, all of this pre-Palin) Arianna pointed to the melee caused by journalists relying on pollsters’ data.
We decided to create a editorial feature that would express our irreverence to pollster data and elicit some smiles from some of our savviest users.
HuffPollstrollogy: 2008 Editorial Feature on HuffingtonPost.com
The goal was to create a simple chart, easily scannable and scalable (for both the candidates and a few enhancements that we suspected might be made along the way).
We had a few major challenges to work with:
- Pairing weather forecasts with each of the candidates’ daily and hourly locations
- Making a lot of data fit into a very tight (and unforgiving) horizontal space
- Employing familiar iconography that would be sassy and smart and represent four very different concepts: Astrology, Weather, Polls, and Betting Lines.
As Arianna prefaced:
Polls have come to dominate the media’s horse race coverage of political campaigns. Pundits and reporters constantly use them to tell us who’s hot and who’s not — but skip over the fact that plummeting response rates and variables like undecided voters and margins of error often render these polls useless as anything other than lightweight diversions on par with horoscopes and political betting lines. Below you’ll find a slew of polling, astrological, and betting information that will hopefully help the polling junkies in the media keep polls in the proper perspective.
We’ve also updated HuffPollstrology to bring you regular takes from astrologers on the state of the presidential race. And we’ve included a section that digs deeper into how polls are conducted. And to make sure we’re really investigating, we’re going to add various blogs and articles that cast a skeptical eye on polling.
HuffPollstrollogy @ Huffingtonpost.com - Conceived for 2008 Presidential Elections
See it yourself: www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/huffpollstrology
