After seven years working primarily as Front-end developer at Vizzuality and CARTO, I decided to alter course and hone my design skills.
Fernando Blat, a former colleague at Vizzuality and one of Spain’s top Ruby on Rails developers, had co-founded a small studio called Populate with a partner.
At Populate, they tackled meaningful challenges in the civic engagement space, driven by a strong commitment to open-source projects and social good. Their focus on impactful projects, dedication to transparency and social impact, and the opportunity to join as their first official designer made the decision to join the team an easy one.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
One of Populate’s most interesting clients of the studio was the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). A few months before I joined Populate, the team had worked on the publication of the Panama Papers—an extensive set of documents that exposed thousands of illegal shell corporations involved in fraud, tax avoidance, and the evasion of international sanctions. This work earned the ICIJ the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2017.
Redesign of the ICIJ website.
The first project I got involved with was to redesign the ICIJ website and their Offshore Leaks Database, a website that allowed readers to search information about the ownership of more than 100,000 offshore entities in tax havens and discover the networks around them.
I collaborated closely with the ICIJ team to enhance and modernize their website’s user experience and visual design. My work focused on making the data more accessible and understandable to the general public. I developed a new design language and a set of reusable components that could be used to create articles and data visualizations.
Some of the modules that I designed.
During my time at Populate I also worked with Barcelona City Council to extend and improve the design of decidim.org and decidim.barcelona, Barcelona’s web platform for participatory democracy.
