The mass arrest of Hong Kong’s opposition figures by Marcelo Duhalde

In the wake of the two years of protests in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post’s city desk and infographics team decided to showcase 173 prominent leaders, including 108 district councillors that were arrested by the Hong Kong government. The reporters from SCMP’s city desk manually collected the data based on their research from different local media outlets and interviews with the Hong Kong Police Department.

The city desks compiled the photos of each activist from different sources, dimensions and resolutions, the graphic will lack aesthetics if we use pure photos to compose this project. In order to keep the graphic layout artistically consistent, we decided to use illustrations, making portraits of all the individual politicians. The main idea for the digital version was to present it with some mystery and allow our readers to play and discover who is who, by hovering over the dark figures with a spotlight illuminating the person involved and showing the relevant information. This visual solution tries to play metaphorically as the prison lights to monitor the arrested. To accomplish the digital version of this visualisation, we implemented the popular javascript libraries such as JQuery and D3 and took great care with the labelling of the illustrated plates with more than one hundred detainees. We also composed a print version for the paper edition by using a simple colour code to show their situation and the name of each arrested person.