Hurricane Guide
The News Channel 8 Hurricane Guide
News Channel 8 has been producing a hurricane guide to support local efforts towards hurricane preparedness for many years. Starting as a monumental print guide distributed by the humble team during the early days of WFLA, the once useful guide was forgotten by time. Designed for print without a print budget, the information was crowded and hard to read simply for the sake of “In years past”. Once tasked with the updating of this guide, I started to ask questions.
Changing the guide forever.
Original Guide
Hurricane Guide
In 2021 I pitched completely changing our guide for good. Increasing it’s value to our viewers and clients.
When I first started working on the hurricane guide the first question I presented to my team was “Who is our audience”.Realistically, I see the hurricane guide’s viewer to be a middle-aged to elderly person living in Tampa who did not prepare for hurricane season. I imagine they may be trying to pull this up on their phone or tablet, due to a lack of a home computer, during or right before the storm comes. Also, our viewers would want to get the information they needed quickly, possibly while experiencing a disaster. I met one of our viewers via phone call and was able to learn from her what is important to her. She was an elderly woman, new to Florida, looking to understand our flood zones and eager to understand preparedness. She needed assistance downloading the guide and wasn’t tech-savvy.
Hurricane Guide
While management was hesitant to leave the booklet style, a compromise was made to make way for an interactive PDF; still designed as a booklet.
While I started conversations about collaborating with our digital team, there was a clear attachment to the guide’s original booklet roots. It was not yet time to shift away from the guide’s printed roots and leave the “book” side of the guide in the past. However, I negotiated an interactive PDF. The interactive nature of the booklet allowed our sales team the option to sell clickable ads at a higher value to our clients, increasing our budget for hurricane preparedness. The digital format also allowed for more pages. Recognizing my audience I made the information easier on the eyes, withlarger text, and greater white space. This also creates a greater sense of ease in a likely stressed viewer. Understanding that our viewer lives in a digital age, I wanted to make it quicker to navigate, adding a clickable contents list & usable checklist.
Hurricane Guide
Coming Soon
We’re actively working to change things up for our 2024 guide. The success of these last iterations has paved the way to fully bidding farewell to the booklet format. However, every goodbye is also a hello. We are very fortunate to work for a larger-scale company where our 2023 guide’s graphic look will be reduced/reused/recycled into another station's 2024 guide. Stay tuned for both of those iterations!