St. Petersburg Times
As talk of U.S troops invading Baghdad increased, so did the our curiosities of what the battle would be like in the city of Baghdad. The impending dangers of encountering an enemy that doesn't abide by rules of engagement would definitely yield high casualty rates, especially at the cost of U.S. soldiers. One of the most incredible facts we discovered was that, typically, in urban warfare, the invading army will lose six of their own to every one of the enemyl. With that fact, we knew what we wanted to explain in the graphic ‹ Why is urban warfare so dangerous?

Graphics reporter Amanda Raymond and myself worked on this graphic together. It was a very complicated topic to tackle on the short deadline we had to work with ‹ two days. Amanda worked mostly on the research and text while I worked on the design and rendering. Amanda had a friend who served in the military and provided us with exceptional information on how troops set up command stations in the perimeters and move in small packs on foot throughout the city. She also is fantastic at getting great information fast. She found some good websites that explained how troops seal off a room in a building and some of the dangers they could encounter while advancing through narrow and deadly streets.

The best experience about our work together on this project was our teamwork attitude and how we relied on each other to look at both the text and the design of the graphic objectively. If something didn't make sense we talked about it and made the necessary changes. No egos and no hard feelings. We even found ourselves switching places. I would rewrite some of her text while she would rework some of my drawings. It was a fantastic team effort. As for the design of the graphic, we both thought that a dynamic 3-point perspective would be a fantastic way of bringing the reader into the scene (third-person). This was something we learned from our mentor Javier Zarracina of El Correo, who's one of the best at dynamic perspective.

From what we were able to gather, this was the first graphic we had seen published on this topic.

Research and interviews: 12 hours
Writing: 6 hours
Design: 12 hours
Editing: 4 hours

— Submitted by Jeff Goertzen