WGN-TV

Case study

Nearly seven years of daily broadcast design at Chicago's number-one morning news station, and the first automation system I built to keep up with it.

Role: Creative department intern, then Graphic Artist, then Graphic Artist / Media Manager · January 2014 – September 2020
Daily: News full-screens, lower thirds, monitor-wall and quarter-panel graphics across six hours of live morning television
Systems: After Effects + Excel automation: 900+ trivia animations a quarter for Antenna TV and This TV; a station-wide media-asset migration
Recognition: 2015 Silver Dome Award, Best TV Use of Graphic Design (Illinois Broadcasters Association)

The 2018 WGN Sports package

The art director set the design; I built the motion. Transitions, interstitials, and per-player and stats animations for WGN Sports, plus matchup and monitor graphics for the daily sportscast. It was the last package WGN Sports aired before the station's 72-year Cubs run ended in 2019.

WGN Sports package · animation, from the art director's design

Sportscast monitor graphic, movie-poster parody · composite

Opens the newsroom could reuse

Franchise and segment opens, built as template families so producers could rebuild them for the next story without a designer.

"Something Good" franchise open · design and animation

"Face of Chicago" logo and lower third · design and animation

Anchor send-off, “That’s all Folks” · design and animation

One open system for every newscast, and a sheep

For the 2015 WGN News redesign I assembled the opening sequences that introduce the anchors on every show: one template family with replaceable media slots, so a new open could be built without rebuilding the animation, and retouched anchor portraits so each intro looked shot rather than pasted. The same years I kept a sheep on the air: lower thirds, transitions, and time cards for WGN Night Cap, the late-night sitcom block hosted by the puppet Frank Woolanski, including the green-screen keys that put him in frame. And in my last month at the station I designed and built the live Ross Xpression graphics package for Chicago Football Weekly, WGN's Bears show with Jarrett Payton and Lauren Magiera, which premiered September 5, 2020.

Whatever the rundown needed by air

Obituaries and disaster relief on the same desk as holiday cards, segment gags, and the occasional bunny suit, each with the same turnaround.

Hurricane Harvey relief, quarter-panel · design

Holiday full-screen, "Chance the Wrapper" · concept and composite

"Celebrity Wheel of Misfortune" segment graphic · design

Traffic segment bit, the "Late Slip" · design

"Know Your 80s Music Videos" segment, on air · monitor graphic

Viewer text-line promo full-screen · design

National Milk Chocolate Day, package-design composite · design

Holiday card for the anchor team · concept and composite

900 animations a quarter, without a designer in the loop

Tribune ran two national multicast networks out of WGN's Chicago building, Antenna TV and This TV, and both carried trivia lower thirds through their programming. After Effects templates driven by Excel spreadsheets turned the trivia copy into finished animations, about 900 a quarter, at a volume nobody could have keyed by hand. It was the first version of an idea I have built three times since: build the system, then let the team ship through it.

Context

WGN Morning News was Chicago's morning leader for ten consecutive years in Adults 25–54, and held its widest lead of that streak, +70% over the nearest competitor, in 2020. The graphics were one part of that; the station's consistency was the rest.