In 2025, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an investigation with New York Times and Der Spiegel, uncovered a number of cases of minorities turned into forced labor and shipped across China to work in factories producing goods for the brands in the West, including KFC, Sketchers, and US car, aerospace and defence industries.

I was added to the project as an external contractor to create a scrollytelling presentation, using maps and smartphone videos (made by the chinese workers and uploaded to Douyin, China’s version of TikTok) to show the transfers and the conditions these workers were subjected to.

I used Mapbox to build initial tile-layers and animate them. Javascript was used to determine specific points in website scrolling progression and to bind them to animation keyframes, so the animation would play automatically as the user scrolls through the website.

Boxes with videos and text explaining what happened in each location were overlaid on top of the map, and as users would scroll from one to another box, watching the videos and following the story, the map would zoom, pan and focus on certain locations, all while making points, lines and borders visible or invisible, depending on the context.

Please click on the link below to see the whole presentation in action. It was built with responsive design in mind, so it works both on computer screens and mobile devices.

Tracking forced labour across China

Breadcrumbs list

TBIJ

In the early months of 2024, OCCRP and its publishing partners got hold of a big leak of property records from Dubai, UAE. We focused on researching how many people in the leak are criminals, suspected criminals, politically exposed individuals and/or subjects of international sanctions, compiling a database of several hundreds individuals. Editorial decision was to present these records in form of several interactives - A scrollytelling animation with background video, a database of exposed individuals and another scrollytelling explainer showing how people could purchase properties in Dubai with illicit/laundered money.

The main scrollytelling narrative needed to look as compelling as possible so we decided to combine video that advances on mouse scrolling with HTML text cards cued to right moments in the video. We didn't have any drone shots of Dubai so the decision was made to create a simplified model of the city (40x40 square kilometers area) and create a fly-through animation highlighting specific buildings from the story.

I used Openstreetmap data and QGIS to scrape data for the requested area of the city. Then I used Blender (Open-source 3D modeling and animation application) to convert this 2D data into 3D city. Positions of roads, buildings, coastline and other features were directly sourced from GIS data, while the buildings' heights were calculated from each building's number of floors (found in metadata), then multiplied by 3 meters per floor in height in the 3D model. Finally I animated the camera, set the timing and rendered the final result using Cycles rendering engine. Next, the renders were assembled in the form of a video in Adobe After Effects and overlaid with individuals' profile pictures and text labels to show which suspects purchased properties at which addresses.

The final video was exported in versions for desktop and mobile screens and embedded inside a HTML scrollytelling interactive with timed descriptions and in responsive way.

Please click on the link below to see the interactive in action.

How Dirty Money Finds a Home in Dubai Real Estate - OCCRP

OCCRP maps the most questionable real estate owners from a new trove of leaked property data from Dubai, and investigates how the glamorous emirate courts dirty cash.

OCCRP logo

To keep my iconography skills up to date, and also as a creative exercise, once a year I create a set of icons, which usually ends up being distributed freely on the internet under the Creative Commons BY license. Until the year 2020 I was making them in Adobe Illustrator and 2021 marks the year when I switched to Figma for a much more streamlined process.

Data visualization is my primary specialization as a designer so for 2021 I made a set of icons revolving around different ways we visualize data and create charts.

All icons were created in a 24x24 pixel grid, with consistent 1pt line width and in outline-only style, making them ideal to use even at smallest sizes in an user interface.

Each year in April, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project publishes an Annual Report detailing previous year's activities and summarizing the investigations up to that date.

Since 2016, I have been responsible for assembling Annual Reports, including all layouts, graphics and data visualizations in them. Starting in 2021, OCCRP Chief Designer James O'Brien joined me and contributes ever since in terms of overall layout and page design.

Organized Crime and Reporting Project has been tracking assets of Vladimir Putin and oligarch and public figures close to him for more than a decade, but in 2022 the organization decided to publish these records in form of an interactive asset tracker accompanied by all the related OCCRP investigative stories.

The investigation was published collectively by OCCRP (Global) and their media and research partners: Anti-Corruption Data Collective, Bird.bg (Bulgaria), Delfi Estonia, Follow the Money (Netherlands), Forbes (USA), Frontstory.pl (Poland), The Guardian (UK), infoLibre (Spain), Inside Story (Greece), Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak (Slovakia), Investigace.cz (Czech Republic), IrpiMedia (Italy), MANS (Montenegro), Miami Herald (USA), Le Monde (France), NDR (Germany), Oštro (Slovenia/Croatia), profil (Austria), Re:Baltica, Reporter.lu (Luxembourg), Siena.lt (Lithuania), SVT (Sweden), Tamedia (Switzerland), De Tijd (Belgium), Transparency International UK

Visual identity for the project was made by OCCRP Chief Designer James O'Brien (imagery and UI) and me as OCCRP Design Editor (charts, data visualizations and UI).

More about this investigation, as well as more graphics and imagery can be found by following these links:

Russian Asset Tracker - OCCRP

Introducing a project to track down and catalogue the vast wealth held outside Russia by oligarchs and key figures close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

OCCRPOrganized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

Explore the global assets of Russia’s oligarchs and enablers | Russian Asset Tracker | OCCRP

A sizable chunk of Russia’s wealth has been siphoned offshore by corrupt politicians and well-connected businessmen. We wanted to know where it went — so we started hunting. OCCRP and its partners trawled land records, corporate registries, and offshore leaks to come up with this database of assets…

OCCRP

In February 2022, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project published stories sourced from over 18,000 leaked record from Credit Suisse about all the shady businesses they were involved in.

The investigation was started by Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and coordinated by OCCRP (Global) which involved numerous other investigative organizations around the globe, such as Africa Uncensored (Kenya), Alqatiba.com (Tunisia), Armando.info (Venezuela), Center for Investigative Reporting (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Confluence Media (India), Depeches du Mali (Mali), Diario Rombe (Equatorial Guinea), Efecto Cocuyo (Venezuela), Expresso (Portugal), Fact Focus (Pakistan), Hetq (Armenia), Impact.sn (Senegal), Infobae (Argentina), Infolibre (Spain), Interferencia de Radioemisoras UCR (Costa Rica), Investico (Netherlands), Investigative Reporting Lab (North Macedonia), IrpiMedia (Italy), Kloop (Kyrgyzstan), KRIK (Serbia), L'Evénement (Niger),La Nación (Argentina), La Stampa (Italy), Le Monde (France), Le Soir (Belgium), Miami Herald (United States), NewsHawks (Zimbabwe), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Germany), Piaui (Brazil), Prachatai (Thailand), Premium Times (Nigeria), Profil (Austria), Reporter.lu (Luxembourg), Shomrim (Israel), Slidstvo.info (Ukraine), Sveriges Television (Sweden), The Guardian (United Kingdom), The Namibian (Namibia), The New York Times (United States), The News (Pakistan), Trece Costa Rica Noticias (Costa Rica), Turkmen News (Turkmenistan), Twala.info (Algeria), Verdade (Mozambique), Vlast (Kazakhstan) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Germany)

To better emphasize this investigation's global nature and the collaboration between all involved publishing partners, it was determined that it should have a consistent visual language across all publications. The designers who put together the visual identity of this whole investigation were OCCRP Chief Designer James O'Brien (Logo, banner images and visual identity) and me as OCCRP Design Editor (infographics, charts, data visualizations and maps).

To find out more about this investigation, please visit the following link:

Suisse Secrets - OCCRP

This is the largest ever leak of account data from a major Swiss bank. Here are the stories we found inside.

OCCRPOrganized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

Between 2000 and 2008, authorities in Kyrgyzstan divided up a large swath of Ataturk Park in the country’s capital, Bishkek, and handed it out to 173 people — many of them wealthy and well-connected.

I was tasked to create an interactive presentation showing what the park looks like today and whom each newly built house belongs to, with their location, profile picture, details and additional documents proving their ownership.

Using satellite photos (from Google maps or otherwise) was out of question due to low resolution and inconsistent imagery, so we flew a drone above the park at 300 meters altitude and made a series of aerial images. Using Photoshop, these images were compiled into one big map, similar to Google Earth, but with far more detail.

This composite image was then converted into a tileset to be used as an interactive map with dynamically loading tiles, depending on which part of the map user is currently viewing (so that they don't have to download the whole 150 MB image down to computer).

Using Storymap.js framework, this was turned into an interactive web presentation that lets users click on locations indicated on map, which zooms on specific location and shows the owner of the building.

For mobile screens, the presentation was adjusted to show map on top and informations on bottom, but keep the same interactivity.

To see this project in action, click on the link below.

Ataturk Map

OCCRP

In 2017, Novaya Gazeta did an investigation into the wealth surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest allies.

I was tasked to create a visual map of Putin's inner circle of friends and proxies and show how they are connected to Putin and what estimated amounts of money they are holding for him.

The final result was a Jquery-run HTML5 interactive where clicking on any person on the map would light up that specific person's image and the connections between them, Putin and their subordinates, as well as show in a tab on the right side more details about this particular subject and the amount of money they kept for Putin.

You can see this interactive in action here:

PutinCircleH

In preparation for their Annual UN Conference, the International Commission for Missing Persons commissioned me to visualize all of the facts about them into a large wall poster that will be printed and put all over the venue. The poster included information about their activities in countries all around the world, their methodology, annual budgets, donors breakdown and list of achievements, which all had to be put in same and consistent design language and presented in a way where one information won't clash with another.

A French chain of eye clinics commissioned me in 2011 for a series of large format wall posters that would explain their patients how different eye diseases start and how they affect the eyesight. Posters were made in French and English language, in complex and simplified variants.