A self-professed visual storyteller, Yiran Zhu, M.A.'15, knows the power of multimedia, interactive graphics and visualization in demanding the audience's attention.
The journalism alumna currently works as a multimedia graphic designer for South Florida's Sun Sentinel newspaper. With the Sentinel, she depicts stories on issues ranging from immigration to the NFL's National Signing Day, but she lights up when describing her capstone project “City Up High” on sea-level rise in Miami Beach.
"I had been seeing a lot of reporting on climate change in the last few years but they never seemed to really focus on solutions for sea-level rise," she says.
The capstone project site uses graphics, video and animation to make visual a very real problem for South Floridians. Zhu collaborated with School of Communication faculty members Rich Beckman, Alberto Cairo, and Erin Brown, locally-based Fusion network graphic designers, and local city officials to help inform her designs. With her team at the Sentinel, she hopes to grow the focus on visualizing climate change, particularly sea-level rise in South Florida.
- Jessica M. Castillo / UM News
