Patrick Garvin's select clips and projects
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Things to do in Boston? Don't listen to the travel guides (opens in new tab)
In 2018, Boston Globe travel writer Christopher Muther asked his Facebook friends where in Boston they would take visitors. The responses confirmed a suspicion Muther had long held: the Boston that travel books portray is not the Boston that locals experience. Worse, Muther realized, the Boston that's sold to tourists is a flat amalgamation of cliches: clam chowdah, sports, and colonial history. Muther's essay on the topic could have just been put in a regular Globe article page, but I thought something this witty and potentially divisive could make a splash on our website. I started thinking of all the visual shorthands for Boston that I could think of, and I realized we could use those in a tongue-in-cheek presentation. I decided to take Muther's best snark to put in pulled quotes done in the colors and fonts of iconic Boston brands. Some brands will be recognizable to people who have never been to New England. Others were Easter eggs for more seasoned locals. The "Cliche Boston" logo lets readers know the basic gist and tone of the story right away, as it is modeled after a certain watering hole where everyone is supposed to know your name. For readers who want to dig deeper into the story, there are plenty of hidden references.
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Boston sports, by the numbers (opens in new tab)
In 2018, the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the ninth World Series title in franchise history. It's the 10th baseball championship for the city of Boston if you count the 1903 championship in which the Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates. Using data I had previously compiled, I compiled a database of all the winners of championships in the NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL. It allowed Bostonians to brag on their teams, but also drew in fans of teams from other cities. Just a few months later, I was able to update this when the Patriots beat the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl. This evergreen project can be resurrected any time there's a Boston team in a championship, which seems to happen a lot. It's easy to update, as the real work is done by the code itself. All I have to do is update the JSON with who played who in a championship game, and the code calculates how many championships each team has won without me having to redo that work.
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Answering Question 3: How well do you understand the ballot question on transgender protections? (opens in new tab)
In November 2018, Massachusetts voters got to decide whether to keep or repeal the state's transgender antidiscrimination law. The law, enacted in 2016 and signed into law by Governor Charlie Baker, added gender identity to the list of reasons people can't be discriminated against in public spaces. Reporter Stephanie Ebbert had covered the law and the efforts to repeal it. Taking her previous articles, I compiled a primer about the ballot measure and the law it targeted. We could have easily done this as a bulleted list with subheads, or even as a simple Q-and-A. Taking inspiration from a Washington Post package about marijuana, I presented this information as a quiz so as to be more engaging for readers. It's not a quiz that "keeps score" or tells you how many you got right or wrong, because the goal was not to "get them all right." The goal here was to encourage readers to read the entire package because there was a lot at stake here, as lives would be impacted no matter how the vote turned out. Mindful of the fact that much of the public discourse on this ballot measure had been reduced to discussion of bathrooms, I carefully picked the images and flow of the questions to better represent the totality of the issues at hand.
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Who we are based on what we drive (opens in new tab)
Boston Globe reporters Todd Wallack and Billy Baker wrote a quirky story using RMV data on the types of cars owned by people in Massachusetts. I took Todd's data and created a few JSON arrays that I then used as the base for two maps and several bar charts. I coded the charts and the dropdowns with JavaScript and D3, though the most fun part of it was the animated SVGs of the cars. The data set was interesting, but had the potential to overwhelm, so I wanted to simplify it and break it up into digestible chunks based on what the readers themselves might want to know about the car they drive or the town where they live. Even then, the data could be dry, so I added the animated cars to give the overall piece a whimsical feel.
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Where To Go In 2019, And Where To Avoid (opens in new tab)
At the end of 2018, Boston Globe travel writer Christopher Muther had an interesting idea on how to preview 2019. "Overtourism" had been a problem for several destinations in 2018, so Muther had the idea of giving people some alternatives to the well-worn places that were trying to curb the number of visitors. He picked six locations around the globe and offered an alternative destination based on what type of vacation you wanted. Design director Heather Hopp-Bruce and I came up with the idea of using vintage postcards as a unifying theme throughout the online package. I tried to emulate the goofiest and tackiest postcards I could find. To his credit, Muther was helpful in suggesting corny puns and taglines for each postcard.
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Why the Boston/St. Louis sports rivalry is unique (opens in new tab)
When the St. Louis Blues played the Boston Bruins in the 2019 Stanley Cup series, it was a historic matchup, and not just because the Blues won the first championship in the team's history. Boston and St. Louis have had a unique relationship that no two other cities in sports share: Boston has not only won at least one championship in each of the four major sports, but it has done so by beating St. Louis at least once in the championship-deciding game in all four sports. I analyzed this data by cycling through JSONS of data in JavaScript and jQuery to build new arrays of information. The interactive itself was put together using JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS.
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Video game: Do you have what it takes to park in Boston after a snowstorm? (opens in new tab)
For years, I had wanted to make some sort of game for BostonGlobe.com. I renewed my interest after some Globe colleagues and I checked out an arcade bar that had recently opened. With those old-school, 8-bit graphics fresh in my mind, I went to work the next day and found inspiration in the Boston practice of using household objects to save parking spaces after a snowstorm. People take the practice extremely seriously, and people who take parking spots that had a space saver have returned to their car to find nasty notes and in come cases, their cars vandalized. Using Javascript and jQuery, I put together this game and aimed for a mid-1980s Nintendo vibe.