21st Century Gold Rush
The epic story of how the refugee crisis is changing the world
A multi-award-winning story for Huffington Post's Highline revealing the criminal masterminds, pencil-pushers and low-flying vultures profiting from the biggest refugee crisis in recorded history.
From Sub-Saharan Africa to Italy and Germany, the authors trace the paths of both refugees and smugglers - showing their lives and the larger forces at work.
Visualising the Gold Rush
Key to the emotional impact of this story is a gold dust allegory that runs throughout. Gold represents the refugees, and in particular provides a bold and emotive cover page for the article.
Our original interactive animation, built in WebGL, captures the faces of nameless refugees in drifting particles of gold dust. The effect suggests the wind-swept sand of the Sahara desert—a key story location.
“Like the people they represent, the golden faces are transient and impermanent.”
Maps, journeys and travellers
This deeply researched long-form article traces the movement of people through places; in locations as diverse as Agadez, Nigeria and Berlin, Germany.
To accentuate this feeling of travelling, we structured each of the four main chapters into further sub-sections, each introduced by a map of its location.
The maps draw themselves onto the page in spidery gold dust - implying uncertainty and change. They feel like heatmaps of a shrouded diaspora and show the profit that refugees are seen as.
