Newsday TV’s ‘one man shop’ creates full election look for publication’s video coverage

Like many print publications, Long Island newspaper Newsday has expanded its digital footprint into video offerings — and this year it tackled offering live coverage of the 2022 elections with a new look. 

Also like many print publications, Newsday is still in the process of experimenting with and building out its broadcast operations, so that meant Gregory Stevens, the creative director for Newsday TV, was tasked with handling pretty much every on-air graphic the organization used in its video coverage that evening. 

This included on-air branding, coding Viz and Viz Pilot Edge templates, deciding on how to shoot the existing set and designing all of the animated elements traditionally used in TV election coverage.

Of course, election coverage tends to be heavily data-driven, so Stevens’ work was much more detailed than just creating a unique look with transitions, opens, stingers, bumps and fullscreens. 

While Newsday TV, which branded its coverage as “LI Votes 2022,” using a common colloquialism for the region, focused on state and regional races, it also ventured into national races, so there was a true breadth of data that needed to be accounted for.

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The end result is a red, white and blue look with a repeating star pattern background in two shades of light gray. A checkmark icon was placed inside of a red box with the branding banner in a box to the right with a row of stars above and below.

The majority of the looks were kept clean and simple, with a mostly flat look. Depth was added in select instances through the use of shadows and both red and blue diagonal elements were also incorporated into the look. 

In addition the starry backgrounds, repeating outline-only typography was frequently used in backgrounds, whether it be for the “LI Votes” branding or on wipes distinguishing between the Republican and Democratic parties, which were accompanied by the traditional donkey and elephant icons with stars.

Outlines of Long Island itself as well as stars and horizontal rule accents were also found throughout the look.

In addition to election night coverage, the “LI Votes” look was also used for pre-election events including debates the outlet hosted.

Creating a complete look for one of the most graphics-heavy news events of the year likely armed Stevens with a variety of skills that will provide handy as the Newsday TV looks to expand its reach in 2023, with the possible addition of daily newscasts, a sports show as well as additional digital-only video segments.

The organization will also air live events originating from its on-site theater, dubbed Studio 2, which is where the debates were produced, according to Stevens.