2024: A Year in the Arts at The Verge

that edge The art team has been busy this year creating illustrations, photography, and interactive designs to go along with stories about undersea maritime cables, competitive Excel, parental anxiety, AI companions, and more. Let’s take a look back at 20 of our favorite projects of 2024, along with comments from those who worked on them.

2004 was the first year of the future

In the 2004 special issue, The Verge We look back 20 years to see how 2004 was “the year of the future,” giving rise to the Internet we know and use today. Cath Virginia completely destroyed the hub design (including three skins! Remember the skins?). Graham MacAree created the softest pages and Amelia Holowaty Krales took the early photos of my dreams. This package is a love letter to the moment we all saw ourselves online for the first time, and a capsule of the hope that it will once again become a place for play, creativity and connection. – Creative Director Kristen Radtke

Photo: Go Takayama

For Josh Dzieza’s feature on the hundreds of thousands of miles of internet cables at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the people who repair and maintain them, we’ve created an immersive electric blue world with maps and schematics. It’s great to have the opportunity to mix data visualizations and maps with amazing original photography. These intimate photographs of Go Takayama’s crew provide an essential but otherwise invisible aspect of their work. – Creative Director Kristen Radtke

Photo: Stormy Pyeette

The visuals of this piece are one of the things I’m most proud of. edge Project. Stormy Pyeette’s ethereal style of floral photography and projection mapping creates rhythmic and captivating functional designs that almost make you want to fall in love. – Cath Virginia, Senior Designer

We started this story to find out how Excel geeks ended up at ESPN. We discovered exactly how powerful, versatile, and important spreadsheets really are, and the power they provide when you can reduce the world to rows and columns. Along the way, our amazing design team found another way to create spreadsheets. It’s about using rows and columns to tell a story and depict characters in their natural habitat. – David Pierce, Editor-in-Chief

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales

Every now and then we get carried away with a special edition print project, and for this year’s subscription launch we somehow convinced our colleagues to pose in 1980s office uniforms. content goblin magazine. Since it’s a question of enshitification on the internet, I basically put as much lumps and slime on top of the design as possible. A/V producer Andrew Marino was the real MVP of this project, allowing him to become a literal goblin. – Creative Director Kristen Radtke

Today’s Smart Home: Hopes and Realities

Residents of homes filled with “smart” technology, including speakers, lights, and robot vacuums, sit by the window, ignore the technology, and look out at the trees and clouds outside. Adrián Astorgano’s vibrant art provides a moving (both figurative and literal) picture of how today’s smart homes are useful and desirable, but not an end in themselves. –Barbara Krasnoff, Reviews Editor

Putting Kristen Radtke’s beautiful comics on the site was an interesting challenge. How can you preserve artwork and animation without sacrificing performance? I think the amount of work done to optimize the piece ultimately paid off in the user experience. This is the softest cartoon yet. – Graham MacAree, Chief Engineer

I love everything Samar Haddad makes. I especially love the way she breaks down complex topics step by step in a clever visual way. For this short series on sports AI, she created a large graphics suite with a cool retro vibe. I hate sports and I love this series. – Creative Director Kristen Radtke

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales; Design by Maeve Sheridan and Cath Virginia

Creating LED images for gift guides is a big job every year. We source all of our products, create unique sets for each guide, and strive to keep you up to date on our entire product line. I love this year’s delightful scene photographer Amelia Holowaty Krales created with a bold, poppy wrapper designed by senior designer Cath Virginia with prop stylist Maeve Sheridan. You can also purchase your own custom edge Wrapping paper from our product store. – Creative Director Kristen Radtke

Find your color at Pantone’s All Brown Party

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales

I’m so excited to go to the party together edge Senior Photographer Amelia Holowaty Krales: One, it means that neither of us wasted time getting into bed with our respective kids, and two, because she is able to convey the mood so clearly through her lens. Her photos from the Pantone Color of the Year party are a visual talking point in themselves, and the use of double exposures throughout perfectly conveys the evening’s brand glamour. – Creative Director Kristen Radtke

Photos by Getty Images and artwork by Cath Virginia

There is much to highlight in this wonderful, cohesive collection of images that help bring physical media issues to life. But I have to pay attention to the turntable turned floppy disk. It’s as clever as it is fascinating. – Andrew Webster, Senior Entertainment Editor

Art by Cath Virginia, property by TurboSquid

The most recognizable part is pitchfork — In addition to the logo — there is a 10-point rating scale. How do you convey the decline of music publications in August? Just lower the volume. – Elizabeth Lopatto, Senior Reporter

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales

Wearables, especially smart rings, tend to be small devices. So when it comes to art, it’s really important to think about how you can make it stand out on the page while also making it stand out from the other. (In fact, after a while, your watch and ring will start to look incredibly similar.) Cue some fun, colorful props and glittery nails! – Victoria Song Senior Judge

The Verge’s 2024 Presidential Election Guide

Design by Mr.Nelson using photos from Getty Images

Wouter Tjeenk Willink (aka) one of the most depressing election cycles of all time. Mr. Nelson has done a decent job with this uncomfortably confusing collage. – Cath Virginia, Senior Designer

Alexa, thank you for the music

Even as people age, they do not stop being individuals capable of experiencing joy. Mojo Wang’s imaginative drawing of an older woman celebrating her favorite music beautifully illustrates an article describing how the author’s mother used smart speakers to enhance the final chapter of her life. – Barbara Krasnoff, Reviews Editor

Google cracks down on sites posting ‘parasite SEO’ content

Photos by Getty Images and artwork by Cath Virginia

Over the past few years, I’ve written about all the ways search engine optimization has infiltrated Google, creating frustrating experiences for both users and website operators. This image probably perfectly encapsulates the worst of SEO: insidious, corrosive, and just plain disgusting. – Mia Sato, Platform and Community Reporter

OpenAI finds answers to copyright issues.

Photos by Getty Images and artwork by Cath Virginia

Basically, my favorite part of the story process is finding out what kind of craziness our art team has created this time. In this case, I think I told Cath Virginia that while she was reporting the story, she felt like the “It’s all Ohio” meme. This is all copyright law and always has been. And she got galactic brains with it. – Elizabeth Lopatto, Senior Reporter

How did Stream Deck emerge from the ashes of a legendary keyboard?

Richard Parry’s delightful 3D animation perfectly captures the cult status of the infamous Optimus Maximus keyboard. – Cath Virginia, Senior Designer

Vice was never as big and solid as Shane Smith’s, and the story had a cartoonish surreality that was perfectly captured in Hunter French’s illustrations. Whether it was Buster Keaton-inspired lead art or Smith misleading the brand in a secret deal, it doesn’t matter. . Sure, there are a lot of complicated financial details, but art is really at the heart of it all. Isn’t that right? – Elizabeth Lopatto, Senior Reporter

Photo: Liam James Doyle and Montinique Monroe

Mia Sato’s article about a lawsuit involving two Amazon influencers is amazing, and the photos of these two individuals are a perfect match. The portraits, taken by Montinique Monroe and Liam James Doyle in Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, Minnesota respectively, were fantastic individually and fit so well together that it was really hard to choose what to use. – Amelia Holowaty Krales, Senior Photographer