In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 28th, Minneapolis-based advertising agency Olson unveiled a remarkable project on behalf of a tiny museum in Latvia. The project had begun more than six months earlier, when Cory McLeod, a senior interactive digital artist at Olson, visited the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum during a summer vacation. Moved by the relatively little-known history of the Riga Ghetto, he returned to the U.S. with the idea of creating an interactive website that would give people everywhere access to the deeply moving experience he had at the museum. Olson completed the site pro bono, and the project required more than simple design and development. “Because we were dealing with personal stories, we needed to navigate the survivors and their relatives, many of whom are historians,” says Dennis Ryan, chief creative officer at Olson. “This demanded an incredible level of precision and sensitivity with the writing.” It also required some detective work: The team matched photographs from the Riga Ghetto Museum’s archives with their exact current location on Google Maps, a unique challenge, but one that allowed them to use the photos in combination with Google Street View, GPS technology and archival audio from the USC Shoah Foundation to enable anyone to explore the historic Latvian ghetto from anywhere in the world. Visually, the designers chose a graphic-novel approach, and the typeface selection was directly influenced by the blocky letterforms of 1940s-era Latvian newspapers. The site is an extraordinary example of the potential of interactive digital storytelling and, for Olson, “a passion project that we did simply because we all believed in its importance,” says Ryan.