This year, The Wall Street Journal has been working hard to unify our newsroom’s design standards and set rules around how we do visual storytelling.

But, we also hired a team tasked with breaking those rules as often as they can.

Our readers spend a lot of time with our visual journalism, and encouraging more visual storytelling is a pillar of our newsroom strategy. Through clear guidance and accessible tooling, everyone should have the opportunity and responsibility to build their own graphics and realise their design ambitions independently.

As the cost of entry for basic graphics and design is lowered, the bar for ambitious visual journalism rises. When do we justify expending effort on something bespoke when we can often do with quick-turnaround tooling?

The answer is to direct our visual experts toward experimentation, innovation, big swings, and new ideas: New ideas only they can realise. New ideas that break with convention. And, most importantly, new ideas we can learn from.

Every project is an experiment

The visual storytelling department welcomed two new designers in 2025: Audrey Valbuena and Annie Ng. Alongside design editor Andrew Levinson, they are our rule-breakers in command.

They design and build stories deviating from our traditional styles, color palettes, typography, and story structure — like this story on the economy of “blind boxes” or our guide to the world’s largest animal migration.

As a new team, they had the opportunity to define their ways of working from the outset and decided to prioritise projects with a specific audience focus or experimentation goal. The idea is that we only break from our design conventions for specific and well-documented reasons.

Some examples of recent hypotheses we’ve tested include answering these questions:

• Do readers engage with in-article audio? The design of the Journal’s investigative series on “stand your ground” laws featured audio components integrated into the body copy. These are designed as optional experiences. We learned users were more likely to interact with the clips based on what they contained, rather than their position in the piece.
• How many questions should our quizzes have? The team opted for five in this interactive test of whether readers could tell AI and human news readers apart. More than 70% of those who started the quiz completed it, which sets us a good bar for further testing.
• Can design help to reach younger audiences? In an investigation into influencers who promote anti-depressants we matched the design of social video platforms through the use of auto-playing vertical video. We found the story over-indexed with younger and female readers.

Each of these examples provides the newsroom with actionable insights into reader behaviour we will use to inform future projects. The more we work this way, the more we reinforce our design decision-making with actual evidence.

These learnings will then form the basis of new rules for visual storytelling, which the team will then try their hardest to break.

Carving out the space to innovate

Our aim is for our entire department to be working this way: proposing experiments, trying something different, reporting back with their findings.

The Journal’s graphics team wears many hats. They are reporters, designers, developers, data visualisers, cartographers, 3D modellers, animators, and artists. It’s a talented team of specialists, but they’re often required to work on simpler visual tasks.

Newsrooms can’t afford for any of their visual experts to operate as a service desk. The goal should be to empower our partners in coverage to self-serve as often as possible.

Self-service doesn’t mean visual teams need to isolate themselves from the rest of the newsroom. Our best work often comes from collaboration combining visual resources with the expertise of our world-leading reporters.

What has our rule-breaking taught us?

• We can push boundaries in specific places when everything else is controlled. This year we launched an internal documentation micro-site called The Cache, which serves as the source of truth for our design standards, keeping everyone aligned in the most accessible way.
• Keeping our decision-making process out in the open ensures we’re judicious in how we decide what to work on. The team introduced a form-driven and Slack-based system, open to everyone in the newsroom, through which all requests are triaged.
• To break rules, you need rules to break. We’ve recently introduced guidelines regulating our use of scrollytelling, and we established a more limited color palette. Our visual journalists are empowered to work outside of the palette, but only if they have a good reason to do so.

To foster a culture of experimentation, newsrooms should place their trust in their visual journalists and provide them the space to tell the stories that only they can.

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