Coral Chronicles

Brief

A qualitative companion to Beneath the Surface, built to bring attention to coral reefs using open-access images and research from the Smithsonian's Invertebrate Zoology department. Corals aid in cancer research and carry anti-viral properties, and they're a crucial habitat for fish — but the deeper-water corals in this data are increasingly damaged by ocean trawling, which became a focal point of the story.

Finding

We aimed for a minimalistic, vintage illustrative aesthetic to harmonize the research with the qualitative data points, and guided users through with a scrollytelling structure — a progress bar that encourages discovery rather than dictating pace.