The Ohio Auditor of State's office is responsible for auditing all public offices in Ohio - more than 5,900 entities - including cities, counties, villages, townships, schools, state universities and public libraries as well as all state agencies, boards and commissions. 

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was an online charter school located in central Ohio, and was the largest virtual school in the country, with more than 11,000 enrolled students. In the last couple of years, as school funding standards changed, it became evident that ECOT was padding its enrollment numbers to gain more state funding than it deserved, thereby costing millions in taxpayer dollars. Many questions arose from the media and others regarding the Auditor's office history with ECOT, as well as when the Ohio Department of Education enacted standards. So the Director of Communications asked me, as the lone graphic designer in the office, to create an interactive timeline with key dates and interactive links to audits, letters, memos and other informative documents.

You can access the interactive portion at https://ohioauditor.gov/ECOTtimeline.html.

I worked on this for about six months, and it underwent several different forms before I settled on this. One of the biggest challenges was squeezing so many details and important pieces of information into a space that would be readable online. The fonts and colors that I used are those that I chose in creating branding that didn't exist before I took the job in 2016. 

I initially tried building the timeline in Photoshop, but later converted it in Illustrator, which I felt offered a bit more flexibility, considering all the text. I researched various ways to build timelines, including a vertical presentation, but decided horizontal would be easier to follow and would make more sense to the average reader, while making additions simpler. The only real technical problem I had was what format would make all the text readable online once I uploaded it to Thinglink, the interactive site our office has a subscription to. This was the first time I had built something like this, so I wasn't sure if a jpeg or png file would work best, and at what size. Thinglink seems to have limitations, so some of the things I thought would make a good interactive experience weren't possible. Basically, all I could do in Thinglink was add bubbles with an image, text and one link, and there aren't many bells and whistles otherwise, at least that I'm aware of. So I did most of the work in Illustrator, making sure that portion of it was set, before moving it into Thinglink.

This graphic provides so much information, both in the base form and the interactive portion: when our office audited ECOT, with links to the audits; when the Auditor sent letters and/or memos to ODE or ECOT; when a key house bill was enacted that put more stringent standards on enrollment reporting, among other things; and when the school finally closed because it couldn't repay the state the millions it received based on padded enrollment numbers. The media can get every detail they need from this timeline to accurately report about the office's involvement with ECOT.