Welcome to Darknet
Special project by lenta.ru about modern drug trafficking in russia.
Journalists from Lenta guided by Vladimir Todorov discovered tons of information about drug markets related to the dark side of the web.
Because of large amount of text we needed extra ways to separate it graphically. We made some project areas to like like they were loading during scroll, so we can had all those horizontal load bars.
Some parts of the text which had contain relatively independent stories were hidden behind upload buttons and appeared upon clicking
Quotes were stylized to look like messenger window
There were a lots of infographics explaining the workflow of the drug selling resources
Project consisted of 3 big chapters. Chapters were published one after another with a gap of 2 days, and each one had it's own sharing image.
We made a lot of glitched gif's to illustrate some parts of the text. The hardest thing here was to make gif's small enough. First step was to reduce basic color table 256 colors to 128 or 64 (depends on image density). Then i had to manually rebuild color table down to range of 8-20. Images based on the hires photo were a real pain.
design: Vasily Shikhachevskiy
programming: Vladimir Terentev
producer: Raikhana Hamidullina
sound design: Yuriy Makeev
© 2017