The CNN Magic Wall, with John King at the controls, has been a popular and critical part of CNN’s politics and live election coverage and storytelling for almost 10 years going back to the 2008 Iowa Caucuses. It has spawned internet memes, been a guest on Saturday Night Live, and been imitated by all of the CNN’s competitors. The Magic Wall is designed to effectively communicate and give critical context around election results and potential election outcomes before, during, and after the election through a variety of data-driven visualizations of live and past election data, population and demographic data, and other critical information. The software is designed to seamlessly integrate and empower John KIng’s storytelling -- features are conceived and designed in part around specific anticipated election storylines to ensure that this is a seamless marriage.

For the 2018 Midterm elections–one of the most critical important, hotly contested and highly watched midterm elections in history–CNN partnered with us to help take the Magic Wall technology to the next level. We collaboratively reimagined the look, feel and core feature set of the main individual applications that make up the Magic Wall to be modern and systematized. We developed a suite of new features and capabilities designed around anticipated 2018 Midterm Election storylines, including, for the first time ever, a House Battle for Control simulation application. We reworked the technology underpinning the Magic Wall to make it more secure and scalable for the future. Most importantly, we worked hard to help CNN keep and extend its edge vs. its competitors.

The Magic Wall is software that is operated by one user (John King), but the ultimate audience experience is watching him use it as captured by various cameras under specific lighting conditions in a television studio. We had to take into account everything from John's height to how colors would look on broadcast. Information had to be big, bold and bright to show up from a variety of camera positions, while interactions and animations had to pop in a theatrical way. John had to be able to smoothly operate a number of complex features while talking and without ever turning his back on the audience. We gave the Magic Wall a modern look, making the key information panels vibrant with effective information hierarchy. We created features like Collections, allowing CNN to visualize specific data sets on the map (such as GOP-house districts that Hillary Clinton won), to facilitate specific narrative storytelling about the dynamics of the election or to show change over time. We worked collaboratively and iteratively with CNN, driven by workshops and constantly evolving working documentation.