Andrea Wise

Visuals Editor

ProPublica

www.andreawise.com

Violent Times

Location: Lawrenceville, NJ

Nationality: American

Biography: I am an interdisciplinary visual editor and art director with 10 years of experience leveraging photography, illustration, animation, collage, audio, and video to bring important stories to wider audiences online. Currently, I do that as visuals... MORE

Andrew has been working on a p... for free in the iBooks store.

Andrew has been working on a project entitledÂ Violent Times: Crime in America's CitiesÂ in which he's been documenting the effects of a culture of violence in various communities where he has lived and worked over the last few years. The work has been recognized by theÂ Alexia Foundation for World PeaceÂ and published in part in a couple of places, but he and I talked about how else we might be able to start getting the work out there.

Andrew was especially enthusiastic about wanting to present the work in a way that would be accessible to the people and communities where he has been photographing.Â

So we decided on an ebook, as it would allow us to present the work in a clean and intuitive interface, but also be easily disseminated for free in the iBooks store.

We also brought in Abby Legge,Â...r , to help us design the book.

We also brought in Abby Legge,Â my favorite young designer, to help us design the book.

There is so much to love about ...' and my best kept secret.

There is so much to love about Abby's design work, but I'm consistently impressed with how cerebral she is about design. In thinking about how to design the cover, for example, Abby picked up on how Andrew's work is about how much violence divides communities and families, and so she translated that idea into the typographic treatment of the vertical orientation title (displayed in the iBooks Store and in your iBooks library). She's also just a great human and is wonderful to work with. But don't tell anyone -- she'sÂ Deb Pang Davis' and my best kept secret.

Abby designed this portrait-ori...ion cover (above) is displayed.

Abby designed this portrait-orientation cover picking up on the divisions violence creates in the families and communities Andrew photographed. This cover is displayed in the iBooks Store and in your iBooks library. Upon opening the book, the landscape-orientation cover (above) is displayed.

For the edit, I broke up the s...rds peace in these communities.

For the edit, I broke up the story up into 4 "chapters" centered around the themes of "innocence", "protectors", "doers", and "loss", each punctuated by portraits of hope, and then I worked with Abby to put it all together in a clean and minimal way that would let the images do the talking.

Abby also had a wonderful solution for handling captions. We wanted caption information to be available but we didn't want to interrupt the flow of the images or break the integrity of any of the images with overlays. We wanted the viewer to first experience the story with the images but then be able to read captions later.

I'm thrilled with how this ebook came out and I hope it will help get this work seen and be part of a movement towards peace in these communities.

PLAY

STOP

GRID

FULL

LOVE

Private Story

Violent Times

Copyright Andrea Wise 2024

Updated Aug 2017

One of my favorite things about editing is that it means collaborating with awesome people to make something special together.

Andrew Renneisen is a super talented young photographer who I met at the Eddie Adams Workshop. He was finishing his undergraduate program at Syracuse University where I was working on my Master's, so we were able to keep in touch.