Grad School Portfolio
This is a 1 minute complilation of animations that' I’ve created over my career.
Hello! I’m Arielle Ray,
and I’ve been a visual journalist/motion designer for the past 10 years.
This is a curated slice of my portfolio that shows my design process and a bit of my career.
Visual Journalism
New York Times
This represents the more utilitarian, journalism-forward portion of my career. The New York Times is very particular about their graphics; their purpose is communication, and they hate having superfluous ornamentation. The NYT requires graphics to operate at their most basic purpose, which is to direct the eye.
This job really helped me to internalize the necessity of simplicity and elegance in minimal designs. I worked in tandem with another reporter to create graphics that strung together the events that happened on January 6th, based on publicly available video footage. All gifs are selections from animations that I created during that period.
Because China
Because China is a Webby Award-winning video series that I art directed during my time at Quartz. It focused on the geopolitical impact of China’s growing population on the world economy.
I created a visual language and system for all of the graphics in the series, optimizing for cohesion. The goal was to pull people in visually, no matter the subject matter. It was important that this visual system was elastic enough to allow for subject matter that varied from pork sales to espionage.
I created the majority of the animated sections and all of the recurring graphic elements, while working closely with the video editor to confirm that the graphics integrated seamlessly with the footage. This is a selection of animations that I created throughout the series condensed into a one-minute video.
For a deeper look into my art direction process, click here.
Commercial Design
As a freelancer, I have worked on projects ranging from creating the look and feel of sports streaming series for HBO to producing and animating explanatory videos that are more in line with my journalism background. My designs generally fall into 2 camps: clean, focused, and minimal videos that are centered around facts, and heavily textured collage videos that tell a story and set a mood.
