As I described in my retrospective on the 2024 elections, the CBS News web team was limited to long pre-existing web components.
By the 2025 elections, CBS News enjoyed a reorganized web engineering team, with the resources to execute a completely new data display component. This was to be a page-wide component, intended primarily for the homepage but usable on almost any page of the site, would support a continuously-updated horizontally-scrolling news feed, and the results for three key races.
Below is an unused concept. I strongly felt that on election day, while polls are still open and no results have yet been reported, a news organization like CBS News ought to display general information about each race and its candidates. My thinking was that political junkies may be familiar with these three races and some of the candidates, but casual visitors to the CBS News site would benefit from some short explanatory text informing them why these races were important. The News editorial team strongly disagreed, and instead, a version of the above was displayed throughout election day, with empty race result tables.
I built a complex prototype, to demonstrate responsive behavior, interaction, and "signs of life" animation (such as a pulsing "live updates" flag, and visual indications of when the news feed is updated or incremental elections results are reported). I cannot present the actual prototype here in my portfolio, due to it using licensed webfonts, but the below screen recording will give some sense of its functionality.
Below are two earlier, unused concepts. This one was an early attempt at condensing race information into the smallest cards possible, theoretically allowing for any number of them to be presenting in a horizontally-scrolling unit. It would also include a streaming video component, which admittedly was an advanced feature unlikely to make it through the design process.
Original verbal descriptions of the project were for it to be closer to a sports-like personality model, whereas candidates would be presented individually as if they were professional sports stars. I gave it a shot, as you can see in the mockup below, but strongly felt that pro sports were no model for the democratic electoral process.
