For most of this year, we've been working on a project at Mowa called 80-25 and it has been a very interesting experience. Extremely rewarding, at times frustrating, but always an avenue for learning.
80-25 is a digital archive of around forty-five years of insecurity in Northern Nigeria, from Maitatsine in the 1980s through Boko Haram in the 2000s and 2010s to the banditry and kidnappings happening now.
When this technically ambitious and sensitive project was proposed to us at the end of last year, we said yes fairly quickly. It was ambitious and genuinely needed and it was also the kind of work Mowa was created to do.
We started with some references from pudding.cool which were a great starting point, one is a scroll-based story that moves decade by decade and the other is a gallery where each tile opens into a detail panel. Those 2 were the models for two of the site's main surfaces, the narrative and the incident explorer. Although we were borrowing the interaction models, we had to be careful not to adopt the tone too since the 80-25 subject matter is quite heavy.
We committed to proper visualisation and mapping tools from the start and hosted it on cloudflare pages (always reliable). One constraint was that we were short on data so the initial build had to use realistic dummy data which could be swapped in later. That way, our design choices were tested against the actual shape and volume of the data early.
After we walked through the first version, we agreed on a fairly big change of direction. We'd started with a lighter, warmer look but moved to a dark theme and a short scripted conversation at the start of the explorer. Later, when reviewers asked for a light mode as well, we added one but kept dark as the default. We also made a lot of smaller calls that probably no one would have noticed if we got them wrong (but they mattered to us).
The biggest technical decision came quite a bit later. The site was nearly finished, but we had built it as a single page app. This meant that the share previews and page descriptions were all keyed off the home page. But we realised the site needed to be cited and read and the content needed to be shareable. So we had to rebuild on a static first setup with islands of interactivity.
Six months in, 80-25 has close to 1400 incident records across 45 years each with its own page, spot on the map and place in a narrative you can move through decade by decade. We're very proud of the part we played in the making of this project.