The 2020 best of digital news design award winners show just how far editorial design has come.

The Society of News Design (SND) posted their awards for work published in 2020. No surprise that the New York Times cleaned house with all of their great work related to the pandemic. And they continued their sweep with many more long-form stories and specials like Who Gets to Breathe Clean Air in New Delhi? and The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century. The former entry features a side-scrolling interface, but please don’t take that to mean carousels are back! I loved Reuters’ work on Wildfires: A devastated coast because of their use of the screen as a canvas meant to scroll. Take a look at this project and others in these awards and tell me the “fold” still exists!

Looking through more work, I’m inspired by the Marshall Project’s art direction for Mauled: When Police Dogs Are Weapons. And I was immediately pulled into the South China Morning Posts’ film China’s Rebel City: The Hong Kong Protests. There is a lot to look through and process.

It’s nice to see the SND catch up to modern times and celebrate the fantastic work that goes into the reportage, data science, and digital design — The new trifecta in solid journalism. The last time I paid attention to the SND awards was five years ago when I attended the event in Washington D.C. at the now-closed Newseum. During the awards, anything published online or considered interactive was referred to as “online multimedia graphics.” As if the newspaper industry had…