For those of you new to our blog, eight students participated in the fall 2009 Medill Interactive Innovation project.  We were charged with two challenging and complex tasks: to (1) perform detailed research of the American obituary, and (2) to reinvent Legacy.com, an obituary publishing company that partners with newspapers across the country and one of the internet’s 100 most visited websites.  For eleven weeks we worked, eventually releasing “The State of the American Obituary”, a report chronicling the history of English-language obituary culture.  Finally, taking into account the changing media landscape and its effect on print media, we released a series of recommendations and design ideas that we believe can transform Legacy into the hub for commemorating loved ones in America.  (Please read more about our project in our first entry of October 2, 2009.)

In this blog we explored not only this project but all things “obituary”.  Read our favorite obituaries of the week posted several Fridays throughout the project.  Read our humorous compilation of synonyms for death, and read our interviews with Washington Post obituary writer Patricia Sullivan and Tribune obituary writer Trevor Jensen. Read about our design process in “Testing the Tests”, and read our series on obituaries from different English-language countries which began with England on November 11.

And please, keep exploring — there’s so much more on this blog and beyond.

Thanks for following us!

Sincerely,

The Team