ST wins 8 awards of excellence from Society for News Design

ST's interactive Smart Nation project, which lets users fly the ST drone around Singapore.
ST's interactive Smart Nation project, which lets users fly the ST drone around Singapore.
The interactive graphics on wild animals in Singapore pulled together photos, videos, maps and icons.
The interactive graphics on wild animals in Singapore pulled together photos, videos, maps and icons.

Is cycling the way to go for Singapore's car-lite vision? Why has there been a spate of wild animal sightings in urban Singapore? An interactive take on these and other issues helped The Straits Times win eight awards of excellence from the Society for News Design (SND), up from two awards last year.

The prizes were for digital graphics and online projects ranging from experimental design for its interactive Smart Nation project, to its feature No One Dies Alone, which followed the Assisi Hospice programme whose volunteers and staff kept a dying man company.

ST's interactive graphics on Singapore's wild animals integrated photos, videos, maps and icons. The project won an award for excellence under the Graphics: Features and planned coverage category.

Another interactive graphic, Cycling to a car-lite Singapore, also won an award in the same category.

The multimedia project featured three teams that each took a particular mode of transport to a set destination. The graphic had a map of cycling paths in Singapore, complete with lengths in kilometres and Park Connector Network Access Points.

ST also won an award given to media organisations with a strong portfolio of work, as well as an individual award for its senior creative director Rodolfo Pazos, 36.

The United States-based SND, which encourages high standards of journalism through design, announced the results for the 2017 edition of its Best of Digital Design Competition last week.

  • LIST OF AWARDS ST WON (AWARD OF EXCELLENCE)

  • BREAKING/DAILY NEWS: PLANNED COVERAGE

    • 7 reasons the world is watching China's 19th Party Congress

    • Balance the Budget

    FEATURES: COVERAGE

    • No One Dies Alone

    GRAPHICS: FEATURES AND PLANNED COVERAGE

    • Where Singapore's wild things are

    • Cycling to a car-lite Singapore

    EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

    • Are you ready for Smart Nation?

    PORTFOLIO: ORGANISATION

    • The Straits Times

    PORTFOLIO: INDIVIDUAL

    • The Straits Times: Rodolfo Pazos

Three gold medals, 42 silver medals and 440 awards of excellence were given out from a pool of more than 1,000 entries from nearly 60 publications. Other winners of the annual competition include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times and Thomson Reuters.

Last year, ST won two awards for its digital news packages on swimmer Joseph Schooling's Olympic win and the global migrant crisis.

"The SND is made up of highly respected media professionals, and well known in the media industry for its commitment to quality content and design," said Mr Warren Fernandez, The Straits Times' editor and editor-in-chief of Singapore Press Holdings' English, Malay and Tamil Media Group.

"So, to receive this validation of excellence from them is very encouraging to all of us in the ST newsroom indeed. It indicates that our efforts to keep striving to produce compelling digital content for our readers are yielding good results."

Mr Pazos, who oversees ST's digital graphics team, said: "Being recognised for our team's efforts at international awards like SND always helps to validate our work and keep us motivated to push ahead with new ideas and visual stories.

"Over the next year, we are looking forward to producing more and experimenting with new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality too."

For more ST multimedia projects, go to str.sg/graphics

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on February 22, 2018, with the headline ST wins 8 awards of excellence from Society for News Design. Subscribe