Open source the ocean

As a federal government contractor, I wrote, designed, and coded Undercurrent, a brief series of proposed visual guidelines for ocean exploration at noaa.gov.

A new mission statement—“open source the ocean”—guided my attempt to shift oceanexplorer.noaa.gov toward a photojournalistic direction. Instead of producing longform pieces in the “captain’s log” format, I created a new digital identity powered by high-fidelity, open source imagery and operating system fonts.

For example, our photos would often appear on sites like Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post with significantly less public interest via our own channels. By similarly repackaging two or three highlight images with rigorously edited microcopy, I asserted we might recreate and sustain this level of engagement ourselves.

While the guidelines were, as a whole, too radical a shift for key stakeholders, elements of the project informed explicitly public facing microsites for World Oceans Day and the Annual Report.