In-house teams: How Reuters Graphics visualises “catastrophic” world events

As part of our new series about in-house design teams, Simon Scarr, deputy editor of Reuters Graphics talks visualising catastrophe, global communication and Star Wars.

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“Just because a story is big doesn’t mean that it’s visual, or that it merits a response from us,” Simon Scarr tells Design Week. “We try to work on stories that really need our work — where the visual aspects are essential to the understanding.”

Scarr is the deputy editor of the Reuters Graphics, the news agency’s in-house graphics team that creates and distributes graphics to its clients all over the world. Recent visuals have covered the outbreak of the Coronavirus in China, Hong Kong protests and the Iran-U.S missile crisis. In January, the team made a scroll-down page displaying hundreds of orange squares, aiming to convey the scale of Australia’s bushfires, which have so far razed 103,000 sq km of land (an area the size of South Korea).

We speak to Scarr about how the team tailors content to clients, keeps up with the news cycle and stays inventive.