2020, What A Year by Condé Nast

We all felt the ways that 2020 upended normal life. At Condé Nast, we had a unique view into what types of content resonated most with people throughout the year. We took the top 1,000 articles and visualized them in multiple ways to show a larger story around how we all reacted to the events of the year. Food and beauty content consumption increased as we cooked at home and prepped for Zoom calls while entertainment content, Condé Nast’s bread-and-butter, was overtaken by the intense focus on COVID-19. We designed a bump chart timeline to see what topics spiked around different shared moments: at the start of the pandemic, we were all reading bread recipes and watching comfort tv; and when America faced a collective reckoning with the death of George Floyd, we saw a significant bump in archival cultural perspectives. This project brought together an entire year of upheaval and togetherness.