Responses by John Patrick Pullen, editor, Long Lead.

Background: Long Lead is a story studio focused on finding, funding, producing and publishing in-depth, long-form journalism. Produced by our design partner Decimal Studios, this site houses our most recent story, The People vs. Rubber Bullets—the most comprehensive explanation of less-lethal munitions ever published.

The goal of this story is to impact the national conversation on less-lethal munitions, to commemorate the victims of these weapons and to show how, over the past 50 years, they have been tragically misused by US law enforcement. The target audience for this production is informed readers of social justice, international and political news; law enforcement experts; and in-depth journalism enthusiasts.

Design thinking: In our first brainstorm for this story, we decided on an image-rich approach that would show how devastating and prolific these weapons are. Using a mix of original and archival photography, we chronicled the history of these deadly weapons. Decimal found ingenious ways to accommodate these hundreds of images and ephemera without overwhelming readers.

But the most attention-getting detail is probably the interactive opener video of a rubber bullet decimating a cantaloupe, shot with an ultra-high-speed camera. Decimal sliced this video into frames and made it responsive to user input, a stunning touch that puts the power of less-lethal weapons at readers’ fingertips.

Challenges: From our podcasts to our web stories, every Long Lead production is made from scratch. We want our stories to define their design, not vice-versa. As a result, many challenges emerge during production and development. On The People vs. Rubber Bullets, shooting and building the slow-motion opener gave us the most heartburn. From finding a video-production house experience with both firearms and ultra high-speed video to getting the files light enough to load quickly but not poorly, it was a fraught experience all the way through—but ultimately worth it.

Navigation structure: Long Lead is competing against established, legacy publications that have made large investments in producing journalism at high volumes. We operate very differently, painstakingly producing relatively few stories but with unrivaled depth. As a result, our stories’ designs must surprise and delight readers to get and keep their attention.

To that end, Decimal delivered tremendously. In this case, the site’s navigation turns readers’ heads with a slick user experience evocative of legal briefs and binders—if such a thing can be said. Each of the six stories in this feature package can be read as a standalone, but they also have cohesion. And perhaps the most subtle, reader-friendly element of the design is how Decimal broke up the long runs of copy with “folios” that flip and break up the text, bouncing images from one column to the other and keeping the reader fresh during this epically long read.

Technology: We used a headless WordPress instance hosted on Pantheon as the source of content. The interface is built in Next.js and served via Netlify. The homepage hero video took some work, but in the end, it’s a similar implementation to the AirPods Pro site, where the user scrolls through a series of images extracted from the video we shot.