The Third Pole
![project image](/portfolio/img/ttp-front.jpg)
An environmental news and data-sharing site
- Role
- User experience design, information architecture, type/layout for screens, and front-end web development
- Client
- Earth Journalism Network, Internews, and The Third Pole
- Live site
- thethirdpole.net
The Third Pole, a nonprofit organization with offices in the UK, India, and China, covers environmental in the Himalaya–Hindu Kush region—the largest reserve of fresh water after the polar icecaps, and a souce of water for a fifth of the world’s population. This redesign gave the organization new ways of building stories, moved the site onto a new publishing system, JEO Newsroom, and marked a new collaboration between the Third Pole and the Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
![project image](/portfolio/img/jeo-sitemap.jpg)
Modular content system
EJN and the Third Pole cover environmental issues that flow freely across borders; they look at problems that present themselves across scales and in a surprising variety of forms. This kind of journalism needs a publishing system that encourages these kinds of connections, and lets the editorial team build stories out of many smaller, sometimes evergreen pieces.
The Content Containers concept aims to provide a resilient, expressive, and structured system for combining a heterogenous array of text-, image-, and data-based stories. The building blocks are individual text-and-image articles, image sequences, maps, and collections.
![project image](/portfolio/img/jeo-content-type.jpg)
![project image](/portfolio/img/jeo-content-types.jpg)
![project image](/portfolio/img/jeo-slices.png)
Variable display options for stories and other content types, changing to fit available space and to meet editorial goals.
Organizational structure
Environmental problems, and the EJN/Third Pole reporting on them, are strongly rooted in The site organizes material by topic and, simultaneously, by geographic region—countries or watersheds. This dual-factor organizational concept drives the site's navigation system and labels.
![project image](/portfolio/img/jeo-org.jpg)
Third Pole DataNet
![project image](/worksamples/images/thirdpole.jpg)
A companion site, backed by an on-the-ground outreach effort, supports the sharing of spatial data among organizations working within the region.