The faces appear whole at first: four people who were attacked online in China, photographed on torn-paper edges, speaking in their own voices. Scroll, and the faces break apart, an eye, a mouth, an ear drifting across the page while the words used against them are crossed out one by one. When the faces return they are whole again, but the tears have not disappeared.
DESIGN
That page, The Chinese Internet’s Hidden Victims, published by Radio Free Asia’s WHYNOT in 2022, was designed and built by one person: Victoria Qiufeng Jin, a creative technologist based in Washington, D.C.
Over the past decade, from Hong Kong to the United States, her work has been honored by the Human Rights Press Awards, the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Society for News Design, the Webby Awards and the Online Journalism Awards. In 2024 the Asian American Journalists Association placed her first among the six recipients of its Excellence in Online/Digital Journalism award in the data category, for What Do 355 Chinese and Foreign War Films Tell Us?
In most newsrooms the reporting, the design and the code of a piece like this belong to different specialists. Jin, who holds an MFA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong, works across the entire production process: the information design, the visual system, the animation and sound, the data visualizations and the front-end code that carries them all.
She began in 2015, when she joined Initium Media in Hong Kong as its multimedia designer. That was three years after The New York Times’ Snow Fall had shown what the form could do, and most newsrooms were still working out how to make it. Her first award came quickly: the 2016 Taiwan fisheries investigation won First Prize at the 2017 Sustainable and Constructive News Award. Since then, international and independent newsrooms have repeatedly entrusted her with this work: Initium, WHYNOT and now Middle East Broadcasting Networks in Washington, where she lives and builds data journalism in English, Arabic and Chinese.
Her work has also crossed into the performing arts. For Stillness, a new commission of the 50th Hong Kong Arts Festival staged at Tai Kwun in 2022, she is credited on the production team as website developer, alongside the choreographer, a sound artist and a new media artist.
What newsrooms kept coming back for, and what the juries kept rewarding, was more than a style: a decision about what a reader should meet first. The three pieces below make that decision three different ways.
The Chinese Internet’s Hidden Victims: torn, then mended
The torn paper design came from a refusal. Jin did not want to illustrate online abuse with the usual images, the cracked screen, the swarm of speech bubbles, the hooded figure at a keyboard, because all of them show the attacker. A photograph passed around and ripped up by strangers shows what happens to the target, and a viewer feels it before thinking about it. Jin originated the interaction concept, led its design, developed the visual system and scrolling sequence, and built the page in code.
I kept asking myself what the reader should feel with each scroll. The hardest part was restraint. Every time I wanted to add something, I asked myself: does this actually help the reader feel more, or does it just make the page look like I did more?
The work was a 2023 Webby Awards nominee in the Activism category and received an Honorable Mention at the 2023 SOPA Awards.
Between Vision and Reality: the story before the numbers
A year earlier, Jin had approached a different version of the same problem. HIV is still heavily stigmatized, and a story that opens with statistics loses readers before the second paragraph. Jin reversed the usual order of information.
The reader first enters a comic-style scrollytelling story about someone facing possible HIV exposure, who has to obtain post-exposure prophylaxis within a 72-hour window. Only after completing the story does the reader reach the transmission charts, the policy context and the full report. By the time the first percentage appears, the reader knows whose number it is.
The Society for News Design awarded the project a Bronze in Design in Health at its 43rd Best of Digital Design competition, which attracted nearly 2,000 entries across all categories, the first major international design award WHYNOT had received. It also received an Honorable Mention for Explanatory Reporting at the 2022 SOPA Awards.
Run from China: from one person to another
The Chinese word 润, pronounced run and a play on the English word, became shorthand in 2022 for leaving China. For WHYNOT’s 2023 feature on that wave of migration, Jin established the project’s visual and interactive system, directed the illustration production and independently handled the web design and development. She structured the page so that readers meet each migrant group in turn, and used a recurring full moon, a familiar symbol of home in East Asian culture, to connect otherwise different experiences of departure.
The piece received an Honorable Mention for Explanatory Reporting at the 2024 SOPA Awards, credited to the WHYNOT team. Jin is the only person credited on the page for web design and development, under the pen name Vic Kim.
What the juries kept noticing
The pattern across these recognitions, from that 2017 first prize through a Human Rights Press Award in 2021 to the AAJA award in 2024, is the point. The awards were presented to publications and teams, but of the four SOPA juries that published comments on entries carrying Jin’s name, three singled out the interactive, animated or data-driven elements: the Hong Kong 1967 map as “a fantastic creative work for digital humanities,” the #MeToo investigation for its “timeline and collection of numbers,” which the jury called “highly informative and original.” Those were the components for which Jin was credited.
Different juries, different subjects, seven years of awards: what they kept recognizing was the same thing, her ability to turn complex reporting into an intelligible and emotionally precise visual experience. Whether the story concerns online abuse, public health, migration or human rights, the interactive form is how the reporting becomes legible and stays with the reader.
The medium comes later.
The order comes first.
Words by DSCENE Editor Maya Lane.
